Concentric circular zones

[Tom_Cook]

I’m trying to lay out a circular board. One side needs to have a large, circular copper area in the middle and then another annular copper area around the outside edge of the board.

Is there a good way to do this in pcbnew? I’ve got jsreynaud’s circular zone plugin script and with that I can combine a circular zone with a circular keepout to create the annular ring, but then of course creating a second circular zone that is entirely within the keepout has no effect - the keepout prevents any copper from filling that zone.

I’m happy digging around in the Python API but some pointers would be useful; is this kind of layout, with a zone that has two separate edges, possible?

[Rerouter]

My personal method is just the one off lazy way, draw a circle then run around it with the zone tool placing down corners fairly regularly. making the corners overlap on one size of the ring before jumping to the other side, tracing it and joining back to the starting point, as overlapped zone areas on the same zone fill.

[pedro]

I have test it with rectangular zones.

Draw 3 zones: the external one, a internal zone for the annular ring and the internal zone in the middle of the board.

Give the higher priority to the inner zones (for example 0,1 and 2 from outside to inside)

Then select the inner zone and fill zone
Then select the middle zone and unfill zone
Then select the outer zone and fill zone

[bobc]

@Tom_Cook

I’m happy digging around in the Python API but some pointers would be useful; is this kind of layout, with a zone that has two separate edges, possible?

In principle you can convert any filled area to a simple polygon (I think). A crude example

It should be possible to adapt the script to draw an inner and outer circle and create a join.

[marcos]

I used a square copper zone, 10mm x 10mm for example. And configured the zone to have 5mm fillets, so it ends in a circled zone. To have concentric circles you play with zone priorities.

There is a max radius limit that is too small, you can follow the bugtracker to make it more visible to the devs

Bug #1780518 “Remove limitation for maximum fillet radius” : Bugs : KiCad

[maui]

@Tom_Cook

I’m trying to lay out a circular board. One side needs to have a large, circular copper area in the middle and then another annular copper area around the outside edge of the board.

an other approach is to make a footprint with your annular zones…

[SOLVED] "Broken Ring" pattern in paste layer for footprint generation

I used a model from a general DS of SiSonic, not knowing the real user case adopted, @nali redesigned it to his model [mems-1] The drill should be NPTH with a less drill size

K5 is supporting also custom pads with ring shapes… you can then omit Mask and Paste in your fp to obtain your zones.

[Tom_Cook]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ve ended up using concentric zones and alternatively filling / unfilling them.

It’d be really nice if you could assign a priority to keepout zones the same as you can to pour zones.