Development Highlight: April Update

Mark Roszko introduced the usage of sentry in MR #1166

Sentry https://sentry.io/ is an open source platform to capture application events, crash dumps, and other random analytics.

Both their hosted platform (https://github.com/getsentry/sentry) is open source and the integrated SDK to handle crash handling in C++ is also open source on GitHub under the MIT license ( https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-native)

Sentry has given KiCad a sponsored account to use their SaaS platform as the KiCad team does not have the manpower to maintain a self-hosted instance.

The plan going forward is:

The introduction of sentry resolves a very long term desire of the KiCad team to capture crash dumps without user involvement and the use of sentry offers us a very easy solution to do it and help make KiCad better for everyone.

Mike Williams' merge request #928 to add orthogonal dragging was finally completed and accepted into the codebase.

What is orthogonal dragging? Well in 6.0 and earlier, a drag operation in the Schematic Editor moves symbols while keeping them attached to the symbol. However, it was a literal form of "attach" and wires would end up at odd angles and directions.

An example can be seen here of the old behavior:

Orthogonal dragging forces all wires to extend and move forming right angles as expected for a schematic.

The new behavior is demonstrated in this animation:

Kevin Lannen in MR #813 contributed a few refinements they found necessary to optimize their workflow with large symbols and the KiCad team agreed with the increase in editing capability.

The additions were: - Filter pins to a unit - Change unit of a pin from the table - Pins can be created or removed in a group symbol by adding/removing the pin number - A count of number of grouped pins is now present

Jeff Young in commit 41c0009 added a new ERC check to warn you when you place a symbol with a incompatible grid. A grid mismatch can lead to situations where connections are not truly made and with a cascade of other issues such as pins being passive can lead to scenarios where you end up producing bad PCBs.

Another wire related contribution by Mike Williams in MR#1146

KiCad 6.0 originally included a single toggle between fixed right angle wires and "any angle" mode.

Mike Williams' MR introduces a wire mode for 45 degree start and end to help in drawing crisp schematics.

You can start drawing a wire and hit the current key combination of Shift + Spacebar to cycle between wire drawing modes.

Placeholder toolbar icons on the left hand side are present to indicate the current mode. They will eventually receive real icons.

Added by Jeff Young in 293021c

You can now declare a text object as "Knockout" meaning the text will subtract from a shaded box instead. This is useful for making more attention grabbing silkscreen.

Since the introduction of custom font support in January, numerous issues were fixed. As of b55bda, custom fonts may now be used in drawing sheets (formerly page templates). The initial implementation back in January only introduced support in the Schematic Editor and PCB Editor.

Introduced in d465eb64 by Jeff Young, there is now a new option that will automatically refill zones on a detected change rather than requiring the user to trigger the Zone fill manually.

This is currently off by default as zone filling performance varies depending on each user’s workstation and it may be a hinderance rather than an aid to automatically zone fill.

Markus Bonk came back to add SpaceMouse support to the Schematic Editor which was merged near the end of March in MR #1169. Previously Space Mouse support was available only in the 3D Viewer and PCB Editor.

Support for macOS is pending fixes by 3Dconnexion in their macOS drivers.