Rounded tracks will also be pretty handy when designing flex PCBs. It may also appeal to the artistic folks who want more control over track layout and visual design. The expansion tool lets you adjust mask clearances for tracks and is handy for RF layout and for high current applications where you want to layer up extra solder on top of exposed copper tracks. These tools work by creating footprints, so it isn’t perfect, but it’s a big step in the right direction.Īlso included is a set of action plugins for arc track corners, track length measurement, and a mask expansion tool. The suite includes footprint wizards for designing mitred bends, tapered track connectors, and arc tracks (radius bends) for RF layout. Recently, has released RF Tools for KiCad which include a collection of plugin’s that address a long felt need for RF design. There’s an active thread discussing KiCad StepUp Tools on the forum with lots of demo videos and helpful assistance. ’s StepUp Tools offers integration between EDA KiCad and Mech FreeCAD. Based on this, one early feature add-on wasn’t really an action plugin, but a workbench for FreeCAD which created a bridge between KiCad and FreeCAD. But if you want to import to CAD, then STEP format works better. If you need nice looking renders, VRML format suits well. This resulted in the ability to use STEP formats for component models in KiCad 3D viewer, and the STEP export feature for the complete board. KiCad StepUp ToolsĪction Plugins came about as a result of work done earlier to improve the KiCad 3D model viewer by adding support for other CAD formats besides VRML. The KiCad website lists a couple of external tools, but there’s a lot of action happening out there, so we decided to round up some of the more useful ones. Since version 5.0, we’ve seen an explosion of extremely useful action plugins for KiCad that have added some very useful bells and whistles.
#Kicad flip board view how to#
Then head over to this forum post for a roundup of Tutorials on python scripting in pcbnew, and figure out how to Register a python plugin inside pcbnew Tools menu. If you’re interested in creating action plugins, check out documentation at KiCad Plugin System and Python Plugin Development for Pcbnew. The plugin system is a framework for extending the capabilities of KiCad using shared libraries.
Sometime around version 4.0.7 (correct us if we’re wrong), it was decided to introduce “action plugins” for KiCad, with the intention that the larger community of contributors can add features that were not on the immediate road map or the core developers were not working on. Action plugins stand to both reduce developer load and increase the pace of development by making it easier to add your own functionality to the already extensible tool. One bottleneck with open-source development of complex tools like KiCad is the limited amount of time that developers can devote for the project. Even so, there are many cool new features that are still in process. The last two years has been a particularly exciting time for KiCad, for users, casual contributors, and for the core developers too.
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