Curved card does not generate all tabs

[Zuikkis]

Prerequisites

• I have read FAQ
• I have searched existing issues (including closed ones)
• I use KiKit at least version 1.7.2 (older version are not supported)

KiKit version

kikit, version 1.7.2

KiCAD version (only KiCAD 8 and 9 are supported)

KiCad x64 on x64 Version: 9.0.7

Operating system

Windows 11

Description

I have a curved card that I need to panelize. It seems to be impossible to generate all tabs to the inner side of the arc. I have tried "tabs type: fixed" and also tried the annotation with kikit:Tab footprint, but that fails also.

I think the issue is that the automatically generated partition line is the bounding box, and the center part of inner arc is too far from the partition line? Is there any way to draw the partition line manually?

I included an example project that only has the card outline. There's also generated _panel.kicad_pcb that shows the error.

KikitTab.zip

Steps to Reproduce

Kikit command line used to generate the example panel:

kikit panelize --tabs "type: fixed; vcount: 8; hcount: 0" --framing "type: tightframe"

Screenshot of the generated panel:

Closeup of the error:

I believe the last line is the culprit, "ray length is not sufficient". I think this is not a configurable variable?

[Zuikkis]

Looking at the source:

KiKit/kikit/annotations.py

Lines 29 to 46 in c59789d

	class TabAnnotation(KiKitAnnotation):
	def __init__(self, ref, origin, direction, width, maxLength=fromMm(100)):
	self.ref = ref
	self.origin = origin
	self.direction = direction
	self.width = width
	self.maxLength = maxLength
	@staticmethod
	def fromFootprint(footprint):
	origin = footprint.GetPosition()
	radOrientation = footprint.GetOrientation().AsRadians()
	direction = (np.cos(radOrientation), -np.sin(radOrientation))
	props = readKiKitProps(footprint)
	if "width" not in props:
	raise ValueError("Tab annotation must a KiKit annotation text with 'width' property defined")
	width = units.readLength(props["width"])
	return TabAnnotation(footprint.GetReference(), origin, direction, width)

It seems the default "ray length" is 100mm, and there is no easy way to override it. Perhaps it could be read just like "width" from the props? I think my card would work just fine if I could increment ray length to 150 or 200mm..

[Zuikkis]

Continuing my monologue. :)

I installed local copy of kikit source. I can confirm that just changing above fromMm(100) to 200 fixed the issue for me. However I would prefer not needing to use my own version. But at least we now got a proper panel for this board.

[yaqwsx]

Resolving this meaningfully means resolving #151 and developing a new algorithm to construct the partition line. Which is not straightforward. I will probably address this once we start working on KiKit 2 based on the new KiCAD IPC API.