KiCad EDA V6.0 Released

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#5
It has matured really nicely. However I'm disappointed that they didn't make it easier to exclude soldermask from tracks without having to draw over them. That's one of the things that was really annoying in v5 and I was hoping they'd fix it.
 
#8
bogdan2011 said:
It has matured really nicely. However I'm disappointed that they didn't make it easier to exclude soldermask from tracks without having to draw over them. That's one of the things that was really annoying in v5 and I was hoping they'd fix it.
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I don't know if this is exactly what you mean, but in v5 I often used the Solder Mask Expander in the RF-Tools plugin to keep mask off traces.

V6 contains so many things that were at the top of my wishlist. Both eeschema and pcbnew have so many improvements, I'm still having to remind myself to use them. Very, very, very glad I didn't decide to buy Easy-PC when I started doing this stuff.
 
#9
There are feature(s) that got attention without much up-votes, this one has only 2 and is scheduled for v7.0, which means it will be added. Another one is Teardrop which only has 14 up-votes and is being implemented in v 7.0 as well so as a conclusion I can't see the actual weight of up-votes on the developers decisions, hence a couple of up-votes doesn't sound too bad for this old request and many other old/new requests.

In the meantime, there is a plugin for that "Soldermask expander for tracks v2.3", I believe this plugin is part of the RF-tools plugin:

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#10
Having a milestone doesn't mean it's scheduled for a particular release. It just means that someone is going to look into it for that release.

Teardrops had many, many up-votes. Sadly our migration from Launchpad to Github left the old upvotes in a different field, with a different scaling (see the "weight" field and divide by 6).

But in any case a feature gets built if (1) a developer wants to work on it or (2) it has a lot of up-votes and a developer is willing to work on it. (1) doesn't require any up-votes at all, and (2) still requires that someone is at least somewhat interested in it. It is, after all, a volunteer project.

(Actually there's also (3): if someone is willing to pay someone else (such as KiCad Services Corp) to build it.)
 
#11
The thing that I think would be most useful at this point is a better way to handle repeat features. For example, say you have ten voltage input channels on a device, that are all copies of each other, feeding into a single ADC section. Okay, you can handle some of that on the schematic side with hierarchical sheets, but on the PCB side, it's a real pain to deal with.
 
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#15
H713 said:
The thing that I think would be most useful at this point is a better way to handle repeat features. For example, say you have ten voltage input channels on a device, that are all copies of each other, feeding into a single ADC section. Okay, you can handle some of that on the schematic side with hierarchical sheets, but on the PCB side, it's a real pain to deal with.
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Did you try the replicate plug-in? It's the coolest function ever and worked really well for me once you get the hang.
It copies pcb-layout from one hierarchical sheet onto all the others. Just Google it and you will find a tutorial.
 
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#20
Is there a way to make it so that when you "update PCB", there's an option to delete all extra footprints EXCEPT the mounting holes? That would be super nice. Otherwise I find myself doing bad things like adding mounting holes to my schematic.
 
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