kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Evan Shultz <evan.shultz@xxxxxxxxx>]

A few thoughts from the peanut gallery...

I strongly agree with Jon here, as a power user of Allegro's Constraint
Manager. It simply _is_ complicated to navigate a full-featured design rule
system. There will (may?) not be a way of getting around that when a lot of
constraints have been added. Adding loads of tabs spreads things out which
hurts users who are really using the design rule system. It can be
overbearing at first, and making an easy on-ramp for novice users can be a
challenge, but I would hate to see a powerful design rules system that
doesn't work well for those who want to use it's capabilities. Allegro has
a dialog that turns each constraint on and off, which is totally separate
from setting up the values of each constraint. I personally think bringing
those two together would be helpful as they're tightly integrated.

If knowing how Allegro does it, simply to get another perspective but
certainly not as an example of the "correct way" to do something in an ECAD
tool is helpful, just let me know.

It could possibly be easier to manage if a simple graphic pops up for each
design rule showing a generic representation to what that constraint
pertains. Something like the Altium screenshot you showed above, Jon. Being
able to select a DRC marker and then get information about what's causing
it will help all users. Another helpful feature would be if two elements
could be selected and their constraints viewed, so that even if a DRC isn't
being generated the user can query the board. Lastly, some kind of report
would be useful to let a user search for net names and ref des and other
elements to see the design rules in the board, and if the report is
reasonably human-readable it might also suffice for an import/export design
rule file format.

One way of perhaps using tabs would be to break the pieces of the design
rule system down into different areas: electrical (trace lengths, diff
pairs, etc.), copper (allowable vias, trace widths, etc.), spacing,
silkscreen (silk over pads, min silk line width, courtyards, etc.). That
might allow a tab for each area with a tree system for the constraints
within each area. A spacing matrix is a powerful visualization tool which
could also fit into a tab.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned are the handling of groups of elements,
such as multiple traces which need their lengths matched or a net class
that contains multiple nets. How that is shown in the UI might require
another level since each of those groups must break out the elements within
it to help the user configure the groups and track down where a DRC is
being generated.

On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 4:12 PM Eeli Kaikkonen <eeli.kaikkonen@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 1:29 AM Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>
>> The problem with tabs is that they can only expand so far before you have
>> to start scrolling (and so some tabs are not visible).
>>
>> Yes, that's why I thought a combination of tabs and a tree (or grid as
> you said) may be good. There's still free space for a tab or two. Indeed,
> post-v5 the footprint warnings have got their own. I have always thought
> that the messages about non-continous edge cut don't belong with the rest,
> so I would move them to their own tab.
>
> Eeli Kaikkonen
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