Copper fill clearance around through hole pins

[h2oboy]

Yes, correct. TC1 was the initial header added prior to the zone being created. TC2 was created afterwards.

My last email summarized the problem. You don’t need to be a clairvoyant. Maybe I should just delete all the other posts. The last one summarizes the issue.

I did contact Macrofab and asked why they had $ signs in their footprints. The answer was that they were created by a script and there was some shared-functionality with eagle, which uses $ in pins.

I’m fairly new to Kicad. Where do you raise bug reports? Maybe I will look at the code myself eventually when things slow down.

tldr: don’t use $ in your through hole footprint pin names or bad things may happen.

[PCB_Wiz]

@h2oboy

I’m fairly new to Kicad. Where do you raise bug reports? Maybe I will look at the code myself eventually when things slow down.

Bugs are reported here : https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad

To get the best response, include a simplest test case & the KiCad version info & OS of your test build.

• in your case I’d suggest a footprint with alternating Good/Bad pin names could be a good test.

This reported behaviour seems almost deliberate - hard to see how clearance would otherwise care about a pin name.

I would also suggest you test/confirm on a nightly build https://kicad.org/download/
in case it is already fixed.

[davidsrsb]

@h2oboy

tldr: don’t use $ in your through hole footprint pin names or bad things may happen.

Stick to A-Z and 0-9, almost anything else risks being interpreted as a special character at some point

[h2oboy]

@davidsrsb

@h2oboy

tldr: don’t use $ in your through hole footprint pin names or bad things may happen.

Stick to A-Z and 0-9, almost anything else risks being interpreted as a special character at some point

Exactly. Anybody who writes software has seen cases like this before. Thanks.

[Joan_Sparky]

@h2oboy

Maybe I should just delete all the other posts. The last one summarizes the issue.

Unless there is spam or ‘unpleasant information’ in a post it’s not a good idea to do this in a public forum as there are a lot of people just reading (even years after the fact) and if the conversation is crippled the whole thread becomes absolutely useless to them.
For personal notes or a Wiki (even there you see wikipedia to keep a history) this is OK, but not for a discussion board

PS:
If you absolutely want to ‘fast forward’ to a conclusion/solution, edit the first post and ADD an extra marked section with the ‘conclusion/solution’. This will help people of the future as well, as they click on the thread and stumble upon the solution right in the first post, so they save time by not having to go through the whole thread…

[h2oboy]

@Joan_Sparky

@h2oboy

Maybe I should just delete all the other posts. The last one summarizes the issue.

Unless there is spam or ‘unpleasant information’ in a post it’s not a good idea to do this in a public forum as there are a lot of people just reading (even years after the fact) and if the conversation is crippled the whole thread becomes absolutely useless to them.
For personal notes or a Wiki (even there you see wikipedia to keep a history) this is OK, but not for a discussion board

PS:
If you absolutely want to ‘fast forward’ to a conclusion/solution, edit the first post and ADD an extra marked section with the ‘conclusion/solution’. This will help people of the future as well, as they click on the thread and stumble upon the solution right in the first post, so they save time by not having to go through the whole thread…

Don’t worry… I am not going to delete them. That was tongue-in-cheek.

[bobc]

I’ve had problems importing designs from Eagle, some of the conventions used there seem weird, and names with $ quite ugly to read. $ is somewhat confusable with S; there seems no reason to use $.

I’ve noticed Macrofab, SnapEDa and others providing automated KiCad translations of Eagle source data, often the KiCad version is poor quality and unchecked, in some cases gives an error loading into KiCad. Always use caution if you suspect the data originated with a different CAD package.

I didn’t find a spec for KiCad names, I tried !""£$%^&*()_+=?-[]}{:@~#'';/..,<> which seemed to be accepted… not sure “anything goes” is a good idea though.

I usually end up renaming everything to a more pleasant KiCad style, but KiCad supports direct import of Eagle PCBs and footprints, so if there is a bug it is worth reporting.