Dear all, I'm not a native english speaker so please excuse my approximate english writting.
I used to be an happy GEDA/PCB user and I recently switched to KICAD. I'm happy with that choice (I still maintain old projects under PCB which is old fashioned, but works). My professional activity includes a very wide range of actions, from design engineer to CAM operator and board assembly. As a CAM operator I daily face designs produced by different CAD software. As my pcb manufacturing prices are low and my company is young, my clients are DIYs students and small companies. Free (in terms of money) software is common amongst my clients. I can appreciate the differences between CAM files produced by different tools. By now I was glad to work with kicad files as it was prefectly state of the art : Power planes are not vector filled polygon but rasters Round / rectangle and oblong pads are "flashed" rather that drawn (means it is described in the apertures list and then inserted in the gerber file with a single set of coordinates). In the most recent builds of Kicad it seems that soldermask generation changed. Soldermask used to consist of flashes and now it consists in raster polygons. The problem is that a raster polygon is a kind of drawing and lacks the information required for a pad. The two main drawbacks are : * The shape and size of the soldemask feature can not be easily modified. This is an important issue as we (too) often have to modify it as designers take great care of the copper and little care of the soldermask. Now with kicad designers I just don't use their soldermask. I generate a new one from the copper layer by copying and enlarging pads ans use the user soldermask layer for the controls. * Alignement of soldermask and copper can not be done by center alignement of pads as there are no pads in the soldermask. For similar reasons it is not possible for my flying probes editor to use the soldermask to control what is a pad and what is not. There are probably positive reasons to use raster polygons in soldermask, and I would be glad to hear it, but from the manufacturer's point of view it is a regression. Would it be possible to have the minutes of the debate prior to that change in order for me to understand the motivations? I hope this email is not too direct, I really like Kicad and I am very FOSS oriented. I am glad to use a software of this quality and I hope I can contribute to develop and promote it. Sincerely yours. Lionel SAINTE CLUQUE adresse: 1, rue Paul de KOCK 92500 Rueil Malmaison Téléphone +33 (0)6 18 04 20 75
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