kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I've been wanting to take a look at live zone filling, as it's a really
useful feature that some professional EDA tools have.  If zones refill in
real time as you move things around, it's easy to make sure you leave
enough space for your fill to succeed.

I made a quick patch to pcbnew showing this after an interactive trace move
(see attached gif)
For this board and my computer, refilling is fast enough that this isn't a
problem (I disabled the pop up window showing a progress bar for the
"refill all zones" command).

Can anyone point me to (or send me) some really complicated KiCad designs
in terms of zone fills?  Do people have designs that take a while to fill
even on recent computers?

If I proposed this as a patch, I'd make it an option (disabled by default)
in case it slows down old computers, but I think if zone filling for
moderately complex boards still takes a while even on fast modern
computers, we should look at optimizing it so that we can achieve real-time
filling on modern computers.

Thanks,
Jon

Attachment: refill_after_drag.gif
Description: GIF image