![]() ![]() ![]() My other question is what is the “preferred” way to place the board mounting holes, would that be 360 degree arcs on the edgecuts layer or just place a multilayer pad sized for minimum annular ring? I would hope if it’s on the edgecuts layer somehow that hole winds up being on the Gerber drill list automatically?. Meaning, that if you want to use non 90 degree arcs, you have to drag the end point of a line to snap to the end point of the arc, and not the other way around. The start point of an arc is on the grid, but because of the Pi thing in arcs the endpoint of an arc is not always on the grid, it just is closest to the gridpoint your cursor is on. If you draw a (also random) line and drag the endpoints of the line, then the line snaps to the controll points of the arc and this makes it easy to generate a closed outline. You can also punch in the numbers if you select the arc and press ‘e’: I just did a simple test in KiCad V5.1.0 and drew a (pretty random) arc.Īfter placing a random arc you can drag, center, start point and end point, which gives you enough of an interface for a decent manipulation of the arc. Just as long as it can be drawn with all endpoints on a relatively coarse grid to make all endpoints match it’s pretty trivial to draw the board outline in KiCad. When you get much beyond a basic rectangle, many of usĬrude, yes, but not that bad. The outline could have been created with KiCAD (plus a lot of patience), but I did it with the method outlined above. It shows a board outline designed to hug the interior contours of a commercial enclosure, with some cutouts for switches, connectors, controls, etc. Here’s an example similar to what you are trying to do: This makes it especially easy to deal with things like screw bosses, molding sprues, etc. ![]() Even a basic CAD drafting program will let you do things like snap-to-endpoints, define arcs in at least half a dozen different ways, convert corners to arcs, find tangent points, trim (or extend) lines and arcs to their intersection with other lines or arcs, etc.įor fitting boards into commercial enclosures it’s especially useful to open the enclosure manufacturer’s drawing of the enclosure in the CAD program, then use the program’s “Offset” tool to create an outline which is a fixed distance - say, 25 to 30 mils (1.0 - 1.2mm) - inside the enclosure’s interior contour. I use the open-source, no-charge drafting program called “ LibreCAD”, although there are others that will work as well. When you get much beyond a basic rectangle, many of us find it easier to produce the outline in an external drafting program, then import it into KiCAD as a *.DXF file. Yes, KiCAD’s drafting tools are rather crude and limited in their capabilities. KiCad is not very good in detailed graphics, and when board outlines become really complex they should be drawn in an external program and imported into KiCad. ![]()
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