Deleting a void in a zone

Layout
1

I am doing a 2nd spin of a board. In the original, I added a void in the ground plane beneath a component to avoid programming pads on the bottom of the part. On the new board, I no longer need that void. Any attempt to delete it results in the entire zone deleting.

TIA
bdh

2

Please share your pcb file or at least a screenshot of the region.

3

I assume it is a Pcbnew / Place / Keepout Area. If so then just select it by clicking on it’s edge and press [Del].

If my assumption is wrong or it does not work, then back to nickoe’s remark. Need more info!

4

In the PCBNEW manual, it’s called a “cutout area”. Selecting it and pressing Delete deletes the entire ground plane.

5

doubtful. again, share your file.

6

You have to remove each corner of the zone cutout. When only two corners would be left they are both deleted and the cutout (the hole in the zone) disappears.

7

Unfortunately, it’s one of the quirks.
@eelik is right, the only way to get rid of the cutout is to remove it corner by corner.
Intuitive way as suggested by @paulvdh does not work, as it removes the whole zone.

It’s relatively simple operation that should not involve looking up the manual or posting on the forums. So I see possible kicad UX improvement here.

8

Well, it’s gone. Problem is, I’m not sure what I did. To remove a corner, if you use delete, again the whole zone goes away. The other way to remove a corner is to slide it over another corner. Eventually you are left with a single corner, but if you delete that, same problem. To unfill the zone, I accidentally hit ctl-z rather than ctl-b, and the single corner disappeared. The rest of the zone is still there, thankfully. It;s an RF board and the entire board is a ground plane. Problem solved; not sure why, but moving on. Thanks for all the suggestions.
Bruce

9

The only way is to right click corner, select remove corner. Rinse, repeat.
With two corners only left, the cutout disappears.

1 Like
10

I do not understand.

[Big Edit]

Thanx to halachal (below) I understand.
There are two different ways to make a cutout in a zone.
With a right click on a zelected zone and Zones / Add a Zone Cutout, the cutout becomes a part of the zone itself.

Weirdly enough the “remove corner” does not always pop up in the [RMB] menu.

After I dragged a corner of a Cutout I just made and tried [RMB] again, the remove corner was in the popup menu, and when I selected it, it worked as expeced and removed the corner, and repeating it, when there were two corners left the cutout was removed.

So the trick is to first drag a corner. I guess that the underlying behaviour is that by default KiCad selects the whole zone, and by dragging a corner of the cutout KiCad moves focus from the whole zone to the cutout in the zone itself during editing.

For reference, but obsolete after halachals post:

I just drew a: Pcbnew / Place / Keepout Area:

image
image610Ă—615 83.9 KB

Then selected the just dawn triangle with [LMB] and pressed [Del] and after a b to re-calculate zone-boundaries, the triangle is filled again.

Apparently multiple people are having some issue with this, so what is the difference?

Application: Pcbnew
Version: 5.1.9-73d0e3b20d~88~ubuntu20.04.1, release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 5.4.0-67-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
    Boost: 1.71.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.68.0
    Compiler: GCC 9.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON
11

Apparently in addition to keepout areas, zones themselves can have cutouts added (right-click with selected, Zones -> add cutout).

At first this seemed like an unnecessary duplication of functionality to me, but I can imagine some rare circumstance involving overlapping zones where it might be useful.

12

That’s interesting. I will try that next time. I always forget to try the right click method. Thanks

13

Apparently there’s more than one way to add this void. I used the cutout as described in the manual. Looks like the keepout area will accomplish the same thing, and is easier to delete.

Thanks
bdh

14

Indeed. I did not know either there were two different ways to do this similar thing, and have updated my previous post.

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