ViaStitching

Via Stitching action-plugin for use with KiCAD 6.0+.

Fill a selected copper area with a pattern of vias.

When to use this tool

Whenever you need to fill a copper area with vias to improve thermal or current conduction this tool is the answer (yet not the best one probably). The plugin is based on pre-existing areas so you have to define and select one before invoking the plugin.

Install

As any other KiCAD plugin - ViaStitching must be installed into one of the allowed path, my personal advice is to install it as a user plugin. To install it as user plugin on Windows systems (KiCAD 7.0) you should put plugins files into:

C:\Users\\Documents\KiCad\7.0\scripting\plugins\viastitching

How it works

The workflow is pretty simple: select the area you want to fill, click on Tools->External Plugins->ViaStitching or click on AddNet icon toolbar icon: a dilaog like the one below should appear:

ViaStitching dialog

The vias you're going to create needs to be assigned a net usually this's the net of the target area for this reason the plugin pre-select this net for you; of course you're free to select another net if you like. The plugin dialog let you also specify the parameters for the via creation (via size and drill size), such values are taken from board configuration, you can change them but beware to use values that will not conflict with DRC rules; you can customize also: vertical and horizontal spacing between vias and edge clearance (insert 0 will disable check). When you're satisfied with your settings you have just to press Ok and the fillup will begin (I'm assuming Fill action is checked). If everything goes fine you'll get something like this:

viastitching result

After stitching is always a good practice to perform a DRC.

As you can see some implanted vias may still overlap with some other PCB elements (tracks, ~~zone, pads, vias~~ etc) at this development stage the removal of conflicting vias is up to the user with future releases the implant process will prevent vias to overlap with other elements.

The default action of the dialog is the Fill action (as you can notice from the radio-button on the bottom) but this plugin is not limited to this function only. Clear action works the in the opposite way: it removes from selected area any vias matching settings (i.e. same net, same size, same drill specified in dialog fields). Beware: Clear will not distinguish vias implanted by Fill from user ones until you check the specific checkbox, and will remove all of them if they match the values entered. If you check clear only plugin placed vias widget the plugin will inspect vias grouped on a specific group and remove only those matching: this can be used as an Undo feature.

TODO

Some features still to code:

[x] Match user units (mm/inches).
[x] Add clear area function.
[ ] Draw a better UI (if anyone is willing to contribute please read the following section).
[x] Collision between new vias and underlying objects:
- [x] tracks,
- [x] zones,
- [x] pads,
- [x] footprint zones,
- [x] modules,
- [x] vias.
[ ] Different fillup patterns/modes (bounding box, centered spiral).
[x] Avoid placing vias near area edges (define clearance).
[ ] History management (board commit).
[ ] Localization.
[x] Support for multiple zones
[x] Storage of stitching configuration for each individual zone as JSON string in a user layer.
[ ] Any request?

Coding notes

If you are willing to make any modification to the GUI (you're welcome) trough wxFormBuilder (viastitching.fbp file) remember to modify this line (around line 25 viastitching_gui.py):

self.SetSizeHints( wx.DefaultSize, wx.DefaultSize )

In this way:

if sys.version_info[0] == 2:
 self.SetSizeHintsSz( wx.DefaultSize, wx.DefaultSize )
else:
 self.SetSizeHints( wx.DefaultSize, wx.DefaultSize )

This modification allows the code to work with Python 2 (that's the standard KiCAD/Python distribution AFAIK) as long as Python 3, please note that you need to import sys. Special thanks to NilujePerchut for this hint.

kicad-action-scripts - ViaStitching plugin similarity

Yes my plugin is pretty similar to this plugin but I'm using a radically different approach in coding. At the time I wrote the first release of my plugin unluckly jsreynaud plugin wasn't working but I bet he will fix it.

References

Some useful references that helped me coding this plugin:

Tool I got inspired by:

Altium Via Stitching feature!
https://github.com/jsreynaud/kicad-action-scripts

Greetings

Hope someone find my work useful or at least inspiring to create something else/better. Special thanks to everyone that contributed to this project:

Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone who shared their knowledge of Python and KiCAD with me: Thanks! #

Live long and prosper!

That's all folks.

By[t]e{s} Weirdgyn

weirdgyn / viastitching

readme