KiCAD Track Fillet Joke

[metal]

Anybody seen this video:
https://youtu.be/jUm6pz9fyeE

man, what the fuc.k are they thinking, seriously retarded... What kills me is that people are masturbating about it on facebook and other places....!

They hide their fuc.k ups behind the fact this is open source, so be it open source, why should it be retarded this way...!

really, this one got into my ass, directly..

[sphinx]

I have seen a similar feature in altium but i do not use it, maybe not uncommon. I do not know about other software. I have only used cornered feature.

[Wilksey]

No, it is not a joke, it is very handy for folks who design with flex PCB's and RF.  You may not understand them or have a requirement for them, but it brings the tool closer to a real competitor for closed proprietary tools.

We had to either use a plugin or use the ARC tool before they introduced this if we wanted to do it in KiCAD.

[optikon]

Having smooth turns eliminates the impedance discontinuity of the turn --which is relevant for designs at about 10GHz+

So it is an important feature for some high speed / RF designers.
However, if I was doing such a high speed  critical design, I wouldn't be using a crap program like KiCAD.

[mars01]

I've found it useful to use rounded corners for the traces in some cases where I had many parallel traces in a limited space. If I used the normal 45° corner then the traces would not have fit. Besides there are some autorouter software that work really well (TopoR - topological router) that use rounded corners and free-form traces (they say that it helps with EMC and also they claim that they can fit designs in less space this way).

[metal]

All software vendors are fuc.ked up in one way or another, KiCAD development is shooting high towards Altium thinking they will be a competitor, there's nothing wrong with that, but features priorities are not OK, and finally David Feranic has jumped into the picture, I don't know why..

I don't think it's more important than having curved tracks which 99% of the current users need. They left all the features in a competitive software and jumped to this one! Saying curved feature is not really necessary or important..

[Wilksey]

I guess it depends on the developers and what they want to add, I saw a video from the lead of the project basically saying any new features / updates, unless you pay them to implement the feature you want will implement what they want.

99% of people who are using KiCAD at the moment will just ignore these new features as they do not need it, you can do pretty much anything with it as is with the Python scripting interface.

I use Altium for work (fully licensed etc) and KiCAD for home, and I do not really see the need for Altium at home, and I can safely say that all of the stuff we do in work can be done on KiCAD just as well.

Others have their opinion but having used many different tools over the years (OrCAD, Altium, CadStar, Ranger etc) I prefer to use KiCAD over most of these, a  lot of companies are invested (time and money) into other tools for libraries etc, but there is no reason that KiCAD wouldn't be able to be used in a lot of companies, it is a decent program.

[metal]

Wilksey, I use KiCAD myself, I used OrCAD, EAGLE, DIPTRACE, PCBCAD51, ALTIUM, PULSONIX, etc... I got somehow stuck with EAGLE because of the big community; at work I don't do electronics, then moved to KiCAD in August this year since I have been away off electronics since 2016 and when I looked at available packages, it appeared that I have to use KiCAD. I like the software, but the way features are controlled and the way kicad.info is dominated makes me sick sometimes. DIPTRACE is an excellent candidate, but its marketing sucks, that's why not much people use it, although it has a free version. One thing I read about open source is that you own your files, this is a big lie to be honest when looking at how Redhat betrayed CentOS users.. The same will happen to KiCAD in the future...The same happened to Nessus/OpenVAS, Nagios/Icinga, etc.. This is not the main concern for me here.

[pickit2]

I think KiCad should have a board.

As for the joke, I thought it was a waste matter pipe. joke.

[vern]

if you do layouts in the GHz range you need curved traces. Even my old PCAD from 2006 has the option!

[metal]

The "Fillet Tracks" tool is just meant to be a simple tool for the time being (better than nothing at all). Also, there is a difference between drawing these tracks using a true "curved track mode" and the way being done in KiCAD 5.99 at the moment. I am not saying the curved tracks are not important, rather the implementation sucks!