KiCAD Board Outlines
less than a minute
I recently posted a video walk through of how I use board outlines and form factors as footprints. It’s a useful approach that I encourage you to try, especially when you are supporting many different designs. Simplifying and unifying designs can lead to network effects, allowing faster productivity growth with less complexity!
Summary
There are a few ways to make a board outline in KiCAD:
- Drawing shapes directly with built-in tools
- Design the outline elsewhere, export to SVG or DXF and import as graphics
- Design the outline using either technique, save as a footprint instead of using it directly on the board.
Benefits
- Reusable outline
- Easily updatable
- Footprint can be autoplaced in the same way as any other
- Compound design including mounting holes and fiducials can be included
- A center point of the part can be assigned in the footprint design which can be used as an anchor for the page grid and drill map
- Treating the outline as a component allows the outline to be shared as a footprint package
- Common central storage of all board form factors using the footprint libraries