Circle Tool for NPTH

Just starting to learn KiCad and I needed some NPTH for tie wrapping some cables. I saw a video using the Circle tool and it seems to make a nice NPTH if drawn on the Edge Cuts Layer and it’s viewed in 3D. However it’s not showing up on gerbers or drill table (map). I put a drill table on F Fab layer adding the missing NPTH and also put a note on a added dimension pointing to the holes. I hope the PCB house actually reads this Fab drawing and picks up on this. Is there a better way to add NPTH so they get added to gerbers and Drill Map? Tx!

Circular holes should be in the drill files which are usually Excellon format and have the suffix .drl. Do you not have the PTH and NPTH ones? Not sure about drill table map, I never used them.

So that the strange thing, the Circle tool was used in Edge.Cut where I have the board shape outline. There I added 4 NPTH and they looked good and in 3D viewer they looked good too. But the generated the drill berbers (in the Plot dialog) did not show any holes and yes there were two files generated one for PTH and one for NPTH. So I looked at the drill map and the chart showed the plated thru holes for the component pads but did not have any NPTH holes shown. So I guess the hole made from the circle tool is not considered a PTH or NPRH. Maybe it’s a route and not a drill. Not really sure which is why I’m asking about it.

This is my first PCB in KiCad and very simple one at that just to learn it. I’m a long time Altium user but not working now so don’t have access to it like I used to. Deffinietly need to get used to (relearn) some things. Like the Drill Drawing which Altium generated had all the drill and symbols on the board to indicate where each SIZED drill went. I don’t see that (yet) in KiCad, feels strange not to have it. Anyway I just released this PCB to ALLPCB who I used a lot in the past and soon I’ll see if those holes with Circle tool are drilled… hoe so or I got to do it haha!

Edge cuts are cut by router, not drills. So - no entry in the drill table.

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Ok that’s what I was thinking,… needs to be made from a Pad to be entered in the drill data. Hopefully the top (why front and not top???) and bottom layers berbers contain the data needed to cut the holes.

Kicad has a range of NPTH pads.
In Sshematic they exist in the “Mechanical” library and in PCB they are in the “Mounting hole” library. Did you notice these?

Not bottom, but back. Kicad nomenclature? :wink:

I guess. I never used anything other than Kicad, so I just assumed F.Cu and B.Cu were industry-wide standard abbreviations for the gerber layers.

When years ago I spoke with our local PCB manufacturer they told me that it is important that the documentation is unambiguous and it is not important whether you define the holes as holes or by outline on Edge.Cut. Big holes even defined as holes they will not drill but mill and small holes defined at Edge.Cut they will drill.

Front and Back is one notation, the other is Top and Bottom. Old Protel filenames used top and bottom in the file suffix. Now that .gbr is used for the suffix, the adjective has migrated to the file basename. Doesn’t matter, either pair of adjectives works. Here we talk about front and back as that’s what KiCad uses.

Also I assume you mean gerbers and not these people: :wink:

When you have designed PCB at flat table you had Top and Bottom. When you design it at vertical monitor screen you have Front and Back.

Right? :slight_smile:

So it’s an orientation thing… I still like Top/Bottom better but thanks for clearing that up!

Looks like my original question is answered. Thanks for all the replies!

Front/back and top/bottom are easy to understand on this forum. It is when posters start using terms like “traces” or “parts”, interpretation is difficult. :smiley:

Actually looking at the Ucamco standards, it’s silent on what the basenames should be, it only says that the suffix should be .gbr, as taking up a lot of file suffixes is not nice. KiCad’s nomenclature is reasonable. Modern gerbers contain metadata that state what layer it is anyway.

Look up the “Filefunction” keyword in the Gerber standard. It has info about what the file (layer) is used for. For copper layers it has:

Copper,L<p>,(Top|Inr|Bot)[,<type>]

A conductor or copper layer.
L<p> (p is an integer>0) specifies the physical
copper layer number. Numbers are
consecutive. The top layer is always L1. (L0
does not exist.) The mandatory field
(Top|Inr|Bot) specifies it as the top, an inner or
the bottom layer; this redundant information
helps in handling partial data. The specification
of the top layer is “ Copper,L1,Top[,type]”,
of the bottom layer of an 8 layer job it is
Copper,L8,Bot[,type]
The top side is the one with the through-hole
components, if any.
The optional <type> field indicates the layer
type. If present it must take one of the following
values: Plane, Signal, Mixed or Hatched.