Can a footprint have traces? (trying to design touch-sensitive pad)

[marchinghome]

I recently started playing around with capacitance sensitive pads and I’d like to now design a PCB with a few different ones.

I’m having the best luck with designs where the ground and “sense” sections are both in contact with the finger, so I’m picturing a footprint with 2 connections that are interleaved (like an E and a backwards E). Sort of like this: [https://www.northamericanmotoring.com/forums/attachments/electrical/6416d1119997033-rear-fog-pcb-mod-for-illuminated-toggle-switch-ledcloseup587x600.jpg](example for internets - ignore text)

Is there a way to make a footprint like this with pads that are complex in shape?

Thank you

[Piotr]

I was doing something like that. It ended with discussion:

Bug #1843993 “Why not assume pads with the same number are conne...” : Bugs :...

See Key.png attached to my first post there.

I made keys like that and to satisfy KiCad I later added (at PCB stage) traces to connect rectangle pads of my footprint.
There is the way to define custom pads but I have never tried. Look through FAQs - you will probably find there something about it.

[marchinghome]

So just a follow up to this: It seems to be totally possible!

One video that helped is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSS_IRM5KIY

He shows how to create a custom pad shape by manually adding the geometry in the pad menu, and then later wishes it could just be drawn on the screen. Well it can!

Seems like making custom pads is as easy as drawing the shape on the Dwgs.user layer and then putting a regular old SMT pad inside the shape and then selecting both the pad and your complicated drawing, right-clicking and selecting “Create Pad from Selected Shape” - boom!

So huge thanks to the kicad team for solving this in a very nice way.

[paulvdh]

Oops, I saw this post earlier and wanted to respond, but it slipped my attention.
Footprint Editor / file / Create Footprint brings you into the wizard section and there is also a wizard for capacitive sliders:

And in there you can enter some parameters for a custom shaped capacitive slider:

Those Wizards are typically a few pages of python script, so you can use them as a template to create your own variants.