I am using KiCAD for the first time. I am used to Eagle, but we need quite the large board which cant be designetd with the Eagle student version.
So I am trying to layout a sort of heating foil, meaning I dont have any components but only the track going up and down across the board. My problem is, that without any components KiCAD wont let me create a GND area and therefore there are no spacings around the track. Is there any way to get a board with only the track on it? Thanks for any suggestions
I have wished for the same-net clearance, and my use case was exactly the same (a heating element using traces as heating resistors). I made it using some certain grid spacing and then just drawing the route manually.
But I don’t understand what you mean by “KiCAD wont let me create a GND area and therefore there are noch spacings around the track”. In the simplest case you must have in and out for the voltage/current/power, so you can draw a very simple schematic with two connector symbols with one pin each and use any kind of one pad footprint for them. Then you would route a trace between the pads in the layout. In any case there is the same problem: when you try to route the trace, it tends to get messed up because the nearby trace segments aren’t separated, belonging to the same net. If I remember correctly, I used copy and paste for segments.
You can still make a schematic with two single pin connectors and a single wire between them
Then make a zone on the PCB and create slots with keepout zones to make the zig-zag
In the newest KiCad V6 there are some ways to work without a schematic, but I do not have much experience with that yet.
I’m sure that your heating element has to be connected to some connector. So put a connector in the schematic and draw a wire between the connector pins. It’s just too quick and easy to have any reason to do it otherwise.
Same for mounting holes (if you want them). Add them to the schematic, and assign footprints for the hole size you want.
In Kicad, a net has to have at least one pin. You can make this pin “invisible” on the PCB by using an SMT pad and remove stuff on all layers except the copper layer. For the schematic, any symbol with a single pin can be used as a placeholder. the “test pin” seems relatively appropriate.