KiCad origin transforms

The problem with promising things to a project leader at a conference is that you need to deliver on those promises. Anything less and you lose credibility.

What did I promise to fix? When I started using KiCad in the spring of 2017, I whined about what I considered KiCad stupidity. I itemized seven specific complaints, some of which have since been addressed by the team of mostly-volunteer developers.  After talking about it off and on for almost two years, last month I promised to fix numbers 1, 3, and 5.

I didn't spend two days in Chicago (and pay for the cost of the trip) talking with developers only to lose credibility by not following through.

Here's a live screen-shot of the dialog box that allows a KiCad user to select the display origin, and choose which which way the axes increase.

Here's a screen-shot of a board I made a while back. It may be hard to make out, but I've set the Auxiliary Origin at the lower left corner of the board. With the footprint for the test point TP6 selected, the status bar shows it to be located at (0.6000 in, 0.6750 in).

What's new is that the location is being reported relative to the auxiliary origin, per the user's preference settings. Also note that the Y axis is shown increasing as you move up the screen.

Current-release Pcbnew would have reported TP6 as being located at (5.3500 in, 3.8750 in), which is the offset from the upper left corner of the US Letter sized page on which it is drawn. I consider this basically useless.

Of course this would be confusing if things weren't displayed consistently. Here's a screen-shot of the component edit dialog box for TP6:

Note again that the position of this component is reported as (0.6, 0.675), just as you'd want.

Don't like this? Wish you could have the old behavior back? No problem: that's the default. You have to go into the user preferences to change the original behavior, and you can change it back just as fast.

These are not mock-ups; these are screen-shots of Pcbnew running on my desktop. I'm hoping to submit my patches within the next couple of days, and I'm hoping for it to be merged into the master branch shortly thereafter. Unfortunately for most KiCad users, this change won't appear in stable builds until the v6 release, which isn't scheduled for about two years from now.