Tales from the development of Horizon EDA.
At the end of the presentation on Horizon EDA at FOSDEM this year, I mentioned that there’s going to be a release soon. Soon is now! Even though there are no big new features in this release, enough bugfixes and minor usability enhancements have been accumulating over the last year to warrant a new release. Simplified project pool update One of the major Horizon EDA annoyances when working on…
Welcome back! As you may have realized, Horizon EDA has seen less development activity in the last year than it did before. This is mostly due to me having started developing another CAD software - Dune 3D a parametric 3D CAD. Go check it out on dune3d.org . It greatly benefited from the experience I gained from developing Horizon EDA and reuses many concepts both in implementation and user…
Blind and buried vias There are many advanced features a PCB layout tool may or may not have. While there are workarounds for some missing features, you’re out of luck when you need blind or buried vias and your layout tool doesn’t support them. When starting the development of Horizon EDA, I explicitly decided to not support blind or buried vias to keep things simple and I didn’t expect users to…
Curved tracks KiCad adding support for curved tracks in version 6.0 motivated me to update Horizon EDA’s copy of their router to also support curved tracks and benefit from other developments that happened since the last time I updated it. As always, updating the router is a somewhat daunting task since it’s not a library with with a stable API, so its interface can change in arbitrary ways…
Checks improvements Some users brought up that checks were taking excessively long on their medium-sized board of about 630 components, so I had a look at what could be done to make them faster. Copper clearance check speedup By far the most time-consuming check is the copper clearance check as it has to check almost every copper feature against every other one. It does so by offsetting one by the…
Hierarchical schematics TL;DR just tell me where to find it Open the schematic properties dialog either from the hamburger menu or by clicking on the three dots in the sheet list. There, click on the plus icon to add a new block. How it came to be Ever since the beginning of Horizon EDA, I’ve had in mind to eventually support hierarchical schematics. So when I defined the format for project files,…
Arc selection Being able to select what’s on screen is essential to any 2D or 3D manipulation application, naturally Horizon EDA is no different in that regard. That’s why it was one of the first things that got implemented after some basic drawing methods were in place. To keep implementation complexity low and quickly move on to other aspects of the application, selection was accomplished by…
The the changelog is too long and boring? Here are some screenshots to look at: 3D model alignment 3D models for parts rarely are the right way up. Rather than eyeballing their placement you can now place them exactly by aligning them to edges and other features: Where to find it: Next to the 3D model filename, click on Place… → Align…. 3D model projection Drawing the outline for complex…
Project pools A little more than half a year into the public existence of Horizon EDA people noted that it’s far from optimal that that projects require all used items to be present in the pool. Apart from complicating sharing projects this meant that an updated item in the pool would automatically propagate into the project without any way to review the changes. To fix this, I introduced the pool…
Show check result in remote/git tab The introduction of the poolbot made reviewing pull requests to the default pool significantly easier as it provides an overview of all items in the PR and lists all of their check results. Still, it’s up to the submitter to make sure that all checks have passed before creating the PR. To make their lives easier, Juergen suggested adding the check results to the…