Creating a CapSense Pad - help

[Docara]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to make a footprint for a range of capacitive sense pads and I’m really struggling.
Ultimately I need round and ‘sausage’ shapes pads with the no hole, round or rectangular holes somewhere in them but (not necessarily in the centre)

My requirements.

1. Pad on Back Side of board (opposite to components)
2. The ability to have one footprint but have pads on both sides of the board with an optional hole
3. A via very near the outside edge connecting it to the Front copper
4. Solder mask completely covering it (no relief for soldering needed.

Thanks in advance

[eelik]

Most of these are very basic tasks, have you gone through Tutorial: How to make a footprint in KiCad 5.1.x (From scratch)??

[eelik]

@Docara

Pad on Back Side of board (opposite to components)

Very basic. You can choose the side in the footprint itself or make it front but flip the footprint on the board.

@Docara

The ability to have one footprint but have pads on both sides of the board with an optional hole

Pads on both side, very basic. Optional hole? There are no “optional” pads or holes in footprints (unfortunately). When you have placed a footprint on the board you can edit that specific footprint instance and remove some pads if you want to. This would work if you have only one or two such footprints. If you have, say, 10 with a hole and 10 without, you can make two footprints.

@Docara

via very near the outside edge connecting it to the Front copper

There are no vias in footprints, similar through holes are made with through hole pads. Vias are board items.

@Docara

Solder mask completely covering it (no relief for soldering needed.

Just untick the Mask layer from pad properties.

[Docara]

Hi eelik,

I haven’t gone through the tutorial beginning to end, but cherry picked what I needed for footprints I have already made.

After reading your reply I think my problem is one of terminology, KiCad’s terminology and the datasheets instructions.

The ‘optional Hole’ was written poorly and is open to interpretation. I meant that my library would ultimately have a number of footprints some with and some without hole - Not optionally at ‘run time’ when placing component.

What I was trying to do was place a Touch pad footprint on the back of the board with a connection point on the front of the board which would be in the DRC. This would then mirror my custom Symbol in Schema. How do I do this? The connection needs to be as flat and small as possible,fab houses can make vias really small but not necessarily small flat plated holes.

I suppose I could just do the via connection at the board design stage but the DRC won’t shout at me if I forget to do it.

[Rene_Poschl]

@Docara

The connection needs to be as flat and small as possible,fab houses can make vias really small but not necessarily small flat plated holes.

Vias are indistinguishable from plated through hole pads after exporting gerbers. If you want your plated hole “tented” simply disable generation of the mask cutout in its pad settings.

Unless you talk about blind/burried vias or micro vias (which do not go through all layers and are therefore really different from pads. There is no way to define such a via inside the footprint at this point in time. You could make a feature request regarding this.)