KiCad 5.1 - Creating fabrication drawings

This video covers how to create fabrication drawings, which your board house may ask for while creating your printed circuit board. Be sure to get an example drawing from your board house to see what format they would like for the drawing to best convey information.
Dale on the KiCad forum: forum.kicad.info/t/fabricatio...
Example stackup drawing: dabrez.com/Galleries/Gallery%2...

[@blindhawk9768]

Thanks for wonderful explanation, thanks friend.

[@ohazi]

I'd really like to have a few built-in tools for generating lists, tables, and a layer stack-up diagram. This doesn't appear to be on the Kicad roadmap (I could be wrong, I only looked briefly), but would anybody else be interested? Is anyone currently working on something similar? If not, I'm tempted to try and build something like this myself when I have a little more time. I'll be at Kicon in two weeks, and would love to chat with anyone who might have thoughts on this.

[@amoose136]

Honestly if you don't have a personal creed to only use open source stuff, then I'd recommend just exporting the board as a step file, importing into Fusion 360 and make the drawing there. Fusion 360's 2d drawing workspace is so much more mature than KiCad's even though it's not up to spec with the competition.

[@amoose136]

Probably a way of doing the same thing in FreeCad but FreeCad confuses me every time I try and do basic things in it. I do have great hope for the eventual 1.0 release though.

[@contextualelectronics]

Ah, good point. It's possible to do much more in-depth dimensioning there (or in similar 3D mCAD programs)

[@gpapanikolaou]

yo amoose, have you experienced any weird behaviour of the exported from Kicad step files? Specifically in Solidworks, whenever I import steps from Kicad on the same assembly, some of the 3D model get messed up and spread all over the place.
I am thinking that this is because the exported 3D model is a sum of many step files and Solidworks doesn't like that..Any ideas?

[@amoose136]

George Papanikolaou I haven’t tried in solidworks. I had no trouble in fusion but I did notice that meshes have the traces but steps are only solid geometry.