kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 19/09/2017 à 02:18, Jon Evans a écrit :
> 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
> 

Most of time it takes too many time (On Altium you usually need to disable the automatic zone
filling (at least for large zones) even for a moderately complex board.

You can try the demo "video" that is a very moderately complex board (only 4 layers and only 2
zones), and try to move a "through hole via".

(Try also to add a ground plane on external copper layers covering the full board).

I made more complex boards (up to 16 layers and much more zones).
A 100 zones board is not a very complex board, and if you are moving a through hole via, all must be
rebuilt (or at least all large zones covering the full board like power planes).
Of course, there is room for optimization.

(I saw boards with a lot (40000 and more) of small tracks coming from a lot of length controlled
tracks taking minutes of calculation time on a reasonably fast recent computer)

The only one way I know to be able to rebuild zones during routing on moderately complex boards is
to use threads, but this is outside my knowledge.

-- 
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS