kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Roberto Fernández Bautista <roberto.fer.bau@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jeff,

Did you have a chance to look at the draft document I sent on padstacks a
few days ago? I briefly explain how Altium and Cadstar handle pads and vias
in that document - hopefully it is helpful?

I'd like to point out that custom pad shapes are not actually well
supported in most other commercial EDAs, so what you are doing at KiCad is
definitely above and beyond! Great stuff!

The prototype shape editor that you are talking about: is this in pcbnew or
in the footprint editor? I suppose it would be valid to use this both for
editing vias in the PCB as well as pads in a footprint, in the library.
Maybe this could be done in the properties window of the pad/via where you
could have a basic drawing canvas to draw the shape of the pad/via (maybe
in the future you could even import a DXF or other similar format to define
the pad shape). Each shape could maybe be saved into a library that can be
re-used/selected.

I'd suggest that regardless of it being a "high contrast mode" or a
"properties" window: if you are creating custom shapes for a pad, you
should *only *be doing that: i.e. you are entering "pad editing mode" - you
don't want to be accidentally moving other things around while you are
doing that and certain certain things should be restricted while in this
"mode" - e.g.

   - if you "paste other stuff", you should look at what is being pasted
   and if it is a valid shape object, you could accept it, otherwise just
   don't do anything;
   - you should not allow to "delete the pad anchor" - only to move it
   - new objects on different layers - isn't the idea of this to be a
   padstack editor? If so, then assign those shapes to the specific layer.

I'm not sure I understand your second approach of exploding pads into
shapes? Seems to me like you might end up with a lot of random shapes that
don't get recombined if you forget to run the "recombine" command? Also I
can see that you'd end up joining up several pads together accidentally...
I'd suggest the "editing" mode should restrict editing to a single pad

Roberto (Qbort)

On Thu, 25 Jun 2020 at 21:53, Jeff Young <jeff@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I implemented a prototype of a WYSIWYG custom-pad shape editor.
>
> You can ctrl-E on a pad and it explodes it and puts you into high-contrast
> mode with the shapes.  After editing the shapes a second ctrl-E re-combines
> everything and exits high-contrast mode.
>
> While it’s pretty neat if you do exactly that, it turns out to have a
> bazillion corner cases.  (What happens if you paste other stuff in; what
> happens if you delete the pad anchor; what happens if you create new
> objects on different layers; etc.)
>
> So I was considering a different idea which would be more “regular” (from
> an implementation perspective).
>
> Basically it would be a command to explode *all* pads in the current
> footprint, and a command to recombine everything.  The recombine would
> expand outwards from each pad to consume touching copper shapes.  (It might
> still need a few edge cases for net-ties.)
>
> Thoughts?
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