Mail Archives: geda-user/2018/05/08/01:56:18
Hello Michael,
On Mon, 7 May 2018, michalwd1979 (michalwd1979 AT o2 DOT pl) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
>Adrian, pleas find the board attached. This is a RF board, so it is bloated
>with vias and polygons. It was created with my local patched opengl pcb
>version, with 8 routing styles and solid thermals on pads.
Very nice board!
I see a few oddities. I ask about them to understand your use case better
and to make sure these are not .pcb import bugs in pcb-rnd.
I see you did an interesting RF construct (wilkinson splitter?) at RU200.
With subcircuits that sort of things could be done much simpler, as you
don't need to use overlapping pads, just plain old copper polygons. We
don't yet support subcircuit-in-subcircuit, but that's not far away
either, and then you could have R221 really be part of RU200. Do you have
R221 as a different symbol on the schematics or is it a hidden part of
RU200? Would hierarchical netlists change how you do this?
I am not sure about two aspects of RU200: it seems you have paste on these
large pads that are drawn instead of polygons, which looks like a bug to
me. Then the mask cutout follow these pads closely - I have no experience
with RF, but I though you'd either want a full mask cover or remove mask
from the whole area of the board (as in a 10x15 mm rectangular mask
opening over RU200).
I see some strange layers in the file, layers called "bottom solder mask"
and "top solder mask". These are after the silk layers, which looks to me
as violation of the old format that required silks to be the last two
layers. These layers are also not part of the layer groups. Is this some
special feature of Peter's branch? Strange, because neither the
FileVersion nor the pcb release comment suggests the file format is
different. It seems pcb-4.0.0 ignores these layers. (Btw, in pcb-rnd we
have editable mask and paste layers and mask, paste, silk can feature both
positively and negatively drawn objects so if you used these layers to
draw mask cutouts, that can be done. They are less hackish in pcb-rnd:
they are explicit part of the layer stackup).
I see your vias. A lot of them. (As expected.) Must have been fun to place
them. I plan to add a feature in pcb-rnd (don't yet know when): extended
objects. It will be able to do a lot of things, from plugins, but one of
the first examples I want to do is a "line of vias". It would behave like
a line, you would be able to edit it like a line, grab the endpoints, grab
the whole line, copy or delete it at once; but on the board it would place
a line of evenly spaced vias. I guess that'd speed up drawing wave guides
or those vias around the edge of your board. Would such a feature make
your life easier?
Regards,
Igor2
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