kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Roberto,

Welcome!  Thanks for pointing that out about Altium, I learn something
new every day!

I recommend that you open a merge request for your CADSTAR importer
once it is far enough along for people to do some basic tests.  You
can mark it as "WIP", but having the MR open early will help get early
testing and review so that we can help get it in for V6.

Regarding Pad Stacks, @Jeff Young is probably the best person to sync
with on the lead dev team as he has recently been doing some of the
groundwork.

Best,
Jon

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 9:07 PM Roberto Fernández Bautista
<roberto.fer.bau@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm new to the mailing list. I just wanted to make you aware that I'm starting work on a native Zuken CADSTAR importer for KiCad. I intend to follow a similar approach to @pointhi in the forums for his Altium importer - trying to stick to similar class structure where possible. My "short" term plan is to provide an importer for the CADSTAR PCB archive format (which is an ASCII file that is based on S-expressions). Since I'm doing this in my free time, I expect it will take a few months but hopefully the PCB importer would be ready before KiCad v6 feature freeze. Once I have something that sort of works, I'll make a merge request and ask for further feedback on how to improve it.
>
> Now, on a second note, I'd like to provide some input on Pad Stacks. I joined the mailing list after the last post on the thread "How do we envision Pad Stacks?" (https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg44006.html), so I can't reply to that thread directly, unfortunately. However, the topic discussed in that thread is very relevant to the work I am trying to do with the CADSTAR importer (and I bet also important for the Altium importer @pointhi  made).
>
> I'd like to point out two small inaccuracies in Jon's message:
>
> In Altium you can define a full pad stack when editing footprints: Altium uses a default 14-electrical-layer board stackup which is then mapped to whatever layers you actually use in your design when you include the footprint.
> You can define a SMD pad in an inner layer.
>
> Please see attached screenshots from v20.1 showing above two cases, maybe earlier versions didn't allow this?.  More details can be found here: https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/pcb-prop-padpad-properties-ad.
>
>
> To keep this email short, I've created a document with other bits of information that I feel might be useful (such as how CADSTAR handles Pad Stacks) as well as some suggestions for Pad Stack implementation in KiCad - maybe this could be the start of a more complex design document? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lxBI7_X_I7pO-nuDHPRVlfRBH24XTmwuuN69o_Bqk3s/edit?usp=sharing
>
> Since this mailing list is public, I have made the above link view only access, but if you'd like to edit, just request it.
>
> Please let me know what you think.
>
> Roberto Fernandez (Qbort)
>
>
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