Hi Henner,
I know this is outside the KiCad branch, but if you want to manage
complex board edges including arcs, ellipses or bsplines, you may
consider useful KiCad StepUp...
Recently I've added a feature to allow the user to design the pcb edge
in FreeCAD and push it to KiCad_pcb board file.
The collaboration between FreeCAD and KiCad is bi-directional, then
revisions are possible...
You may have a look at a small tutorial here
https://youtu.be/n44iBpu_YjY
and at the KiCad info forum page
https://forum.kicad.info/t/kicad-stepup-the-sketcher-for-getting-to-blinky/7826
The idea is to manage complex board edges in a mechanical environment
to be able to check collisions and dimension constraints.
Regards
Maurice
On 11/21/2017 6:42 AM, Henner Zeller wrote:
Hi,
So polygons are very neat as they employ the nice polygon drawing
features we are used to from zone drawing [*1].
A missing feature here is to _not_ have them filled but simply an
outline. Why ? This would be _very_ useful to draw Edge.Cuts.
Currently, the only way is to draw single lines, which are then hard
to adjust later, as they all fall apart into separate lines, and have
to be edited manually.
Now, if that could be drawn with the polygon tool, that would remove a
huuuuge pain having to deal with outlines (and yes, I know the usual
advice to draw that separately and import as DXF. But what if I could
just do simple polygons directly ?).
Also what we could get for almost free then: Chamfers and Fillets. I
like to have boards with rounded corners [*2], but currently this is
of course a torture to do manually and and dread it every time it
comes to that part of the project: draw a rectangle with the line
tool. Do circles in the corners and manually calculate where the
center and the start point is, shorten the lines accordingly to match
the length shorter the radius. Do that on all four corners. That
easily takes several minutes and high concentration. And god forbid
one wants to change that again later ...
Now how wounderful that would be if that could be done with the
Polygon tool and I just choose to have a fillet or camfer. If this is
something nobody is working on yet and if people think this is a good
idea, I might have a look over the Thanksgiving days.
Cheers,
Henner.
[*1] also see my mail before [All kinds of glitches], Polygons as-is
are currently broken and maybe the concept should be merged with the
zone ?
[*2]
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hzeller/quadrigotion/master/img/tmc2660-quad-render.jpg
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