Teardrop

[damunix]

It could be interesting to have a Teardrop functionnality when connecting track to pads in pcbnew, because of the personnal soldering.

[m_beischer (m-beischer)]

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Just adding a picture of what tear drops look like in another application. Look at the second picture at:
http://beischer.com/opencad/fillzone.htm

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

Teardrops would be nice to have in pcbnew. Since this is an old wish, I add a new link to some teardrops.

http://www.delorie.com/pcb/teardrops/

[svofski (svofski)]

Teardrops are very useful for making homemade double-sided boards. They reduce tolerance requirements, make the other side less prone to tearing when drilling, all without having to make vias and pads excessively huge. It would be a prized feature for pcbnew.

There is an interesting alternative to having to implement the teardrops at intrinsic level. Take a look at teardrops.ulp for Eagle. A short video here shows how to do by hand what the script does automatically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UCzy9dT-4k

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

The video was nice. Teardrop support would still be even better.

[svofski (svofski)]

My fairly naïve attempt at making teardrops. It's nowhere as nice as delorie.com gEDA plugin.

https://github.com/svofski/kicad-teardrops

It creates them as drawings in the copper layers. It fails when the traces are split near the pads or when they bend too close to the pads. It can also violate DRC when things are tight, so the results should be inspected with care. For small homemade boards (which is the main purpose of this anyway) it still can be useful.

[Mario Luzeiro (mrluzeiro)]

I found this:
http://blog.elphel.com/2015/04/trying-out-kicad/

[firewalker (firew4lker)]

Is there a way to pull a patch from their github?

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

@firewalker, you can select the teardrops branch and click on the
compare link in the top right cornor of the file listing. Then you can
append .patch or .diff to the URL and you get:

https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-source-mirror/compare/master...Elphel:teardrops.patch

2015-06-18 12:18 GMT+02:00 firewalker <email address hidden>:
> Is there a way to pull a patch from their github?
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/593972
>
> Title:
> Teardrop
>
> Status in KiCad EDA Software Suite:
> Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> It could be interesting to have a Teardrop functionnality when
> connecting track to pads in pcbnew, because of the personnal
> soldering.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/593972/+subscriptions

[firewalker (firew4lker)]

Thanks you!

[Timur Kristóf (venemo)]

Just my thoughts here:
Teardrops could be a very useful feature for RF applications, because you get much better performance if your RF connector pad ends with a teardrop instead of a simple track. So I'd be happy to see this feature make it into KiCAD. :)

[Evan Shultz (evan-shultz)]

Teardrops also ruggedize a board dramatically. For vibration-heavy environments, they're a must in my experience.

I'm a Cadence Allegro user and they have a nice blog post describing their shape-based fillets (zone-based teardrops in KiCad-speak) from a few years ago here: http://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/pcb/archive/2009/03/18/what-s-good-about-dynamic-fillets-in-allegro-pcb-editor-check-out-the-spb16-2-release. I've also attached the current dialog for configuring fillets so the breadth of options can be seen.

[Novak Tamas (novak-7)]

There is no severity for wishlist items, but "people affected by bug=22" is serious, so this must be a top notch wish.

[Stephen (steejb)]

I guess it would reduce mechanical (heat/cool) stress not to have a sharp angle?
I'd be interested to see this feature.

[Martin Franke (martinfranke)]

+1 vote on this feature

[tero (kapanen)]

+1 vote

[Abdullah Kahraman (cebrax)]

+1 vote

[Piotr Esden-Tempski (esden)]

Heikki Pulkkinen published some youtube videos on his channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCASRTSg-j5fFHf9uhN3wHdg) showing off teardrops in legacy canvas. I am not sure if he has published his code changes anywhere. To be merged into the official KiCad there probably needs to be more work done on the GAL canvas support. As far as I understand Heikki's implementation is more feature complete on legacy than on GAL. This would have to be corrected before it can be merged. If I understand it correctly the current stance by the maintainers is that no new features that are legacy canvas only will be merged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu69JjOBIyY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed2KFsyXkVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PluDweVfEqE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMHP-67IxvA

Here is Heikki's dev mailinglist post regarding the topic: https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg28113.html

[Hildo Guillardi Júnior (hildogjr)]

This python implementation using the pcbnew library https://github.com/NilujePerchut/kicad_scripts/tree/master/teardrops is the more interesting that I found related to this issue.
But I think the more interesting feature is add this configuration to "Design Rules >> Net Classes Editor", being automatic to each new track.

[Benjamin Kohl (ben-819)]

Could you add the teardown script to the kicad distribution?
https://github.com/NilujePerchut/kicad_scripts/tree/master/teardrops

Can anyone check why it doesnt run with a current kicad version? Thanks.
See issue:
https://github.com/NilujePerchut/kicad_scripts/issues/2

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

@Benjamin, we are currently in feature freeze so this would have to wait
until after v5 is released. Given that it doesn't run on nightly
builds, it's highly unlikely that I would merge in it's current state.
Myself or one of the other lead developers would also have to do some
testing before I would consider merging it. It is something that I
would consider once these issues were resolved.

On 2/11/2018 1:54 PM, Benjamin Kohl wrote:
> Could you add the teardown script to the kicad distribution?
> https://github.com/NilujePerchut/kicad_scripts/tree/master/teardrops
>
> Can anyone check why it doesnt run with a current kicad version? Thanks.
> See issue:
> https://github.com/NilujePerchut/kicad_scripts/issues/2
>
>
>
> ** Bug watch added: github.com/NilujePerchut/kicad_scripts/issues #2
> https://github.com/NilujePerchut/kicad_scripts/issues/2
>

[sto (f4eru)]

Teardrops are a must for Flex PCBs, so useful and needed for me.

[Hildo Guillardi Júnior (hildogjr)]

To enrich the discussion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6_svRNJYls&t=410s

[Sebastian (herostrat)]

Another very interesting action script version can be found here:
https://github.com/jcloiacon/flexRoundingSuite

If someone wants to add the functionality to KiCad this could give good ideas.

[lê văn lập (leevawns)]

Some idea for teardrop in kicad from cr5000, it is realy need for pcb design.

[Frank Severinsen (shack)]

Seth has a branch with (basic) teardrop support, which he rebase every now and then (I think).
https://github.com/sethhillbrand/kicad-source-mirror/tree/teardrops-wip

If some of you could be willing to test the branch and functionality, it could probably speed up the process of getting it into master

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

I haven't rebased that in quite some time. v6 teardrops draw bits from that but file formats will _not_ be compatible. If you create a board using that branch, it will only ever open from that branch.

[lê văn lập (leevawns)]

teardrop from cr5000, they use arc track to create it, i thing this is nice idea, we need arc track before

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1953