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Re: Live zone filling

 

I agree with JP, however I see a chance for KiCad, where this feature might work better than in other EDA packages. I think the only way to get this feature to perform well is to use all available processor cores. Maybe it is enough to distribute all the zones to the processor cores. However i do not know if the KiCad sources allow this kind of multithreading.

Best Regards


Am 2017-09-19 15:26, schrieb Jon Evans:
Yes, I used Xpedition in a past life and one of my missions is to
bring some of its cool features to KiCad :-)

JP, I will do some tests on more complex boards and look in to
possible solutions.
I think this is quite a big challenge but want to take it on, because
I think some of the underlying work needed will also be very useful
for other things (like live DRC checking, autorouting, etc)

-Jon

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 8:35 AM, Clemens Koller <cko@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Hello, Jon!

Just for Reference: That's how Mentor Expedition is exposing
dynamic plane generation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6TskayF1Oc [1]

I would be glad to test these things in Kicad...

Regards,

Clemens

On 2017-09-19 02:18, Jon Evans wrote:
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



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