Master / Slave Zones (not eeschema)

[Matt Rohloff]

I think there is a misunderstanding. I don't believe this is a duplicate. This is NOT about EEschema and reusing circuits. There are NO electrical connections between master and slave. There are NO additional or new components. (which is the purpose of bug #1521062) The slave is simply a 'ghost' image of the master and is ONLY useful within PCBNEW. The 'ghosts' contain the same annotations as the master since they are just an image of it (identical). At best, it is similar to #1782927 - however the method described below likely has significant differences as it is dynamic (not a one-shot tool). Kindly read the entire comment below. Thank you.

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It would be nice to have master and slave zones in pcbnew.

Master is a boundary defined zone (like a fill zone) that can contain the contents of your board.

A slave is an ghost/image/reflection of everything that is within the perimeter of the master zone. The slave is treated as a single object (can be moved/arranged) and is visually dimmed by 30-50%. It would probably work best if a slave object is comprised of 'images' of the individual layers of the master zone.

A single master zone can have multiple slave objects.

Anything that is changed within the master zone is immediately reflected in the slave objects.

Multiple slave objects could be generated. I.e. a command to generate 5 slave objects for a master zone.

The slave objects can be arranged for manual panelization.

With the slave objects being created, a new command could be used to automatically arrange the slave objects relative to the master zone (with user defined parameters - spacing, etc.). This command would be for automatic panelization.

Advantage:
As soon as you have your board layout, you can panelize. Subsequent alterations to the master are reflected in the slaves.

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

@Matt- It was marked as a duplicate because its implementation is a part of the planned implementation for #1521062.

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

Please add any comments to the original report if you feel that there are components not reflected in the report.

[Matt Rohloff (mrohloff)]

@Seth - Thanks for posting the Tech spec in the original bug report. That was my next question! :)

Question 2: Is there a common place for descriptions (or at least bullet points) of all other feature requests?