Hm… not really straight forward to do at all.
Let’s turn the question around: What do you want to achieve? What is your end goal? Why the ring shaped pad?
I ask, as you might not really need a ring shaped pad and something else that does appear similar on the finished pcb will do the job just fine…
Did this for an ultra low profile push switch from Snaptron.
Draw a ring in silkscreen, with a thick trace then edit the properties to the appropriat copper layer. Accept the warning and then place an SMT or through-hole pad in the ring, to allow traces to connect.
One of the downsides of OSX: .tiff is the only format produced by the screen grabber. .pdf comes from the print utility. To get anything else, I have to put it through GIMP or a format converter.
Look at the photo on the right side of the page “What type of plating”
You can see the outer pad is made of rectangular pads rotated at 0, 45, 90 degrees and so on approximating a circle
I get the workaround using the silk layer to make the ring and then changing the active layer to move it to the copper. But note the stencil apertures. I’m thinking that the only way to do this is to follow the same workaround and make the four arcs for the stencil in the silk layer and then move it to the paste layer. Is that the only way to make this kind of arbitrary pad and stenci?
Yes @pedro I see that I have to build the entire pad by hand
copper layer
paste layer
solder mask layer
I guess I’m glad that KiCAD allows for this kind of ‘freedom’, and I could also generate designs as bmp files and then import them and move them to the different layers as well.
If you run a current nightly (or with kicad 5 which will be released within the next few days if we are lucky) you can use kicad stepup to create such a pad including the paste pads.
(The current Stepup converts circular features to polygon pads)