It is a nice feature when you're laying out a board that has mixed metric and imperial footprints, you can line up the grids at a given point in the board instead of having it handed to you randomly depending on where you start drawing the outline. Say you have a 0.1" pitch header and you want to put a part exactly 5 mm right of the last pin you can set the grid origin to that last pin, use a 1mm grid and put your part 5 squares to the right.
Cheers. On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Andy Peters <[email protected]> wrote: > Can someone please definitively explain the purpose of the Grid Origin in > pcbnew? This comes up on the user list and Kicad.info forums regularly. > > Coordinate (0,0) is always defined as the upper left corner of the sheet on > which the PCB is “drawn.” This origin is outside of the normal drawing area. > I am looking at a layout I am working on now, and I put the “grid origin” in > the upper-left corner of the board edge, which is at (25, 50) (in > millimeters). We can move the “Grid Origin” to anywhere on the sheet, but > exactly what does it do and why is it needed? > > The description in the pcbnew manual is: > > “Grid origin. (grid offset). Useful for placement of pads. The grid origin > can be put on a given location (the first pad to place), and after the grid > size can be set to the pad pitch. Placing pads is therefore very easy.” This > would imply that it is wholly irrelevant for layout, and only useful in the > footprint editor. > > I am glad to update the docs with a more cogent description, but I (and > obviously many other users) don’t understand it at all. > > Thanks. > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers > Post to : [email protected] > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
