I am re-spinning a high-current board that uses arrays of holes to increase thermal and electrical conductivity. In some cases, I would like to treat these as vias, and “tent” them with solder mask. Is there any way to do this? I don’t mind drawing the additional solder mask areas manually.
Select your pad (the pad, not the footprint!), press E to open the properties window.
Deselect the Mask layers and you’re done.
Yes, I figured that out, thank you.
But - that means that I had to modify the part itself. I’d kind of like to leave the part as-is, and add solder mask to the solder mask layer manually. I guess that isn’t possible right now.
The main problem is, of course, that soldermask is negatively defined, i.e., you add something on the mask layer where you don’t want mask on the PCB.
Yeah, there would need to be a special zone type that cleared existing solder mask features. Probably not worth it.
Editing the footprint worked, but it meant that the footprints became application-specific. Not a big deal.
You can draw lines/zones/polygons on Mask layers to remove solder mask from these areas.
Yes, but I want to add solder mask…
You can open and edit pads on the PCB without saving to the library footprint.
Yes, I considered doing that, but I thought it might be too easy to accidentally replace the modified part with the unmodified one. So, I just created a version that was specific to it’s placement on the board.
Why don’t treat vias as usual and set tenting when generating gerbers? Currently, many PCB companies offer via tenting and it is not very expensive.
Because I wanted the “vias’ to be integral with the part footprint, and I don’t think there is a way to add a via to a footprint, so I used small pads.
Oh, but there definitely is!
No, you can’t add vias to footprints. Only through hole pads, which are mechanically identical to vias.