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You can use the kicad stepup tool in freecad to create a 3d model of your pcb including the components on it and design the front plate based on that. Edit: link to kicad stepup: https://sourceforge.net/projects/kicadstepup/

Or you design the frontplate first and create a dxf file that you import to any layer of your liking. (The user drawing layer would work well.) You can than line up the components in kicad.

> Oh, so you are an advanced user.

I'm an advanced eagle-7 user, and arguably an advanced EE (I'm Director of EE at the largest hardware startup accelerator in the world).

Still a complete noob with Kicad however, and considering what Autodesk have done to Eagle since they acquired it, it's high time I learn something new - and better fitting with the fact that I've been using Linux since it came on floppy disks and started using Linux desktop as my primary 15 years ago (when geda was the best Linux EDA and it was frankly horrendous).

> Hope your patch reaches the master branch

When git head doesn't segfault every few minutes, I'll probably adapt my patch, and ask the GUI programmers to wrap some GUI elements around it because I'm no good at that sort of thing and I suspect most kicad users may not feel comfortable with this feature being thrust upon them.

I'm wanting to get something similar to this set up.

Currently, my solution is typical outlets with wiring coming from the screw terminals leading to another set of screw terminals that are connected to a relay board.

My idea is to have the outlets soldered directly to the board I'm working on now with all of the relays. So instead of a nest of wires held in place by screws between two areas, it will be a one-piece unit.

As far as strength of them, things will be plugged in or removed twice a year at most. I'm going to be testing some things out in the meantime, but they receptacles would be held in place by ~150 square mm of solder shared between 3 contact points.

You could also add a 1x1x1 cube to your lib and define it as your 3d model. Use offset and scaling options in your footprints to get a 3d model this way.

If you only want this option to reduce file sizes but you have 3d models for your parts, kicad stepup can be configured in such a way that it does not use the 3d models themselfes but their bounding box. (Kicad stepup needs the 3d models in step format.)

helpful links:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/kicadstepup/

https://forum.kicad.info/t/wishlist-quick-extrusion-of-3d-models-for-footprints/1726

Your picture shows a wide parallel bus of some length. As you should know, there is coupling between the traces. This effect is where you change one signal and you see a glitch or blip on the adjacent trace.

Whether it matters depends on the design. For instance, if it's a wide processor bus where all signals change simultaneously and if you give yourself time for the bus to settle, then the coupling doesn't really matter. On the other hand, if the signals are all unrelated and changing at random times, those glitches could definitely matter. This is especially true if one of the victim traces is a clock and it glitches enough to misclock something.

You should read the Johnson and Graham book, "High Speed Digital Design" for a lot more about this subject. Yes, the book is pricey but it's worth every nickel. If it saves you a board spin, it paid for itself.

Suffice it to say that if you're designing a PCB such that aesthetics are more important than the electrical design, you're doing it wrong.

Sounds like you might want to simply make your own part and footprint. Hackaday goes over it in their general guide, but I'm sure there are plenty of resources.

pcbnew has a newer rendering engine than eeschema, and it needs:

• Cairo
• OpenGL
• GLEW
• OpenMP

If that problem turns up again, use Dependency Walker to find whether a DLL is missing.

I asked on the mailing list. Seems the CMS ran out of RAM and no one had actually noticed. It's back up now.

For future reference, you should join the user mailing list and you can report problems with the website there: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/kicad-users/info

Bug reports for KiCad itself should go on Launchpad or the dev mailing list though: https://launchpad.net/kicad