I discovered that placing a copper zone inside another copper zone requires the inside zone to have a higher priority than the outside zone. With proper clearance and corner radius numbers you get a nice copper pour with the overall plane. The gap between zones follows the inner zone’s numbers. But no matter what I do, while it looks fine visually, I get “Copper Areas Intersect” Errors.
I have set the clearances and corner modes/numbers to ridiculous values which always produces the visual that is expected, yet also always produce “Copper Areas Intersect” Errors.
I noticed the the inner zones, although having radius-ed corners, still have definition frames with square corners that may or may not intersect the outer frame.
So, I changed the clearance and corner mode on one of the inner zones so that the definition frame’s corners clearly no longer come close to the boundary of the outer frame.
At least visually.
The errors are still present.
New users may only post one media item.
I don’t understand what else I might try.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Are you 110% sure that both copper-zones have different priority-settings? (as you have self-discovered that is the main key for intersecting zones).
Are you sure there are only these two zones?
Those two zones need to be set at a higher priority than the main plain zone.
I have power supply boards with SMD power mosfets where I have 3 zone priorities touching
Upon posting I realize that there is another zone involved.
The B.Cu zone. There are B.Cu and F.Cu zones that span the board at priority 0.
The inner zones specifie both the top and the bottom layers at priority 2 but not the two inner layers.
The two inner layers of this 4 layer PCB are not specified for the inside zones, only the top and bottom layers. The two inner layers simply surround all the holes involved with no connection as expected.
Both outer layers are ground. One inner layer is +28V and the other inner layer is +3.3V.
The inner copper zones support hot transistors supplied from +15-1 and +15-2.
Both of the inner zones are supposed to be isolated from each other and from the top and bottom surrounding copper zones used for ground.
I found the answer.
This is my first KiCAD experience and the first thing I tried was building that structure to support those two hot transistors. Well, somehow I managed to get a zone on top of a zone on top a zone before I copied it to make the second transistor.
I ended up with one F.Cu zone on top of one B.Cu zone on top of one F.Cu+B-Cu zone.
All overlapping each other.
When I set the zone to priority to 2 I was only affecting one of the three zones.
The other two zones were still at priority zero which produced all of the errors.
I’ve learned that overlapping zones must have different priorities.
I guess I was confused about how to make “one” zone that pours onto multiple layers.
I will pay more attention the next time I have to make a multilayer zone.
