kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Reece R. Pollack" <reece@xxxxxxx>]

Once you establish a base coordinate origin, you really don't want that 
moving. All the mechanical holes, notches, connectors, switches, 
clearances, and other locations are measured from that origin. Moving 
during layout risks placing a component in the wrong spot.

The movable grid origin is extremely useful for placing components or 
routing tracks relative to each other. It's a feature I suspect many 
people use and depend on. And no, you don't want to move the base origin 
for this and then hope you move it back to exactly the same spot later.

The "local origin", the one you set with the space-bar, is handy for 
measuring distances without needing to use a measuring tool. The "Move 
Exactly" dialog uses this to good effect to allow rotation about a spot, 
though one might argue that the grid origin could easily be used for this.

I'm just finishing up a set of patches that allows the user the option 
to see all coordinates displayed relative to the Aux Origin or the Grid 
Origin. The only real complexity in this is the need to pass a reference 
to the transformation class down to all the places its needed, just as 
you had to pass the user's units choice to those same places when you 
removed g_UserUnit last year. This keeps all the transformations from 
the internal origin to a display origin and back in one place. With this 
in place, doing things like allowing the user to choose to make the 
Y-axis increase UP rather than DOWN is trivial (which I've already done).

The origin that is utterly useless at present is the page origin 
somewhere near the upper left corner of the paper drawing frame 
surrounding the board layout. If you could lay out a board so the page 
origin was usefully related to the board's dimensions this would be 
okay, but right now you end up with the paper page's "frame" overlaying 
your board. Get rid of the frame and everything else associated with the 
layout being a paper drawing rather than a digital model of the PCB, and 
we don't need the Aux Origin.

-Reece

On 5/18/19 1:17 PM, Jeff Young wrote:
> Hi Eeli,
>
> I’d argue that you explained what it was useful for, not why it is 
> “needed”.  I can understand offsetting the grid; I can’t say I believe 
> it’s important enough to support the code and UI complexity that it 
> brings.
>
> Cheers,
> Jeff.
>
>
> > On 18 May 2019, at 14:12, Eeli Kaikkonen <eeli.kaikkonen@xxxxxxxxx 
> > <mailto:eeli.kaikkonen@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > la 18. toukok. 2019 klo 13.38 Jeff Young (jeff@xxxxxxxxx 
> > <mailto:jeff@xxxxxxxxx>) kirjoitti:
> >
> >     We need fewer origins.
> >
> >     I like the name Coordinates Origin, but why do we then need a
> >     Grid Origin?  And why a setting for the displayed coordinates? 
> >     Shouldn’t that always be the Coordinates Origin?
> >
> >     Cheers,
> >     Jeff.
> >
> >
> > I think this was already discussed in 
> > https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1773638 and I explained why 
> > distinct Grid Origin is needed.
> >
> > Eeli Kaikkonen
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