Editing a board with no schematic

[Colin_K]

I have a board layout with an error. I do not have a schematic, the designer is long gone. I was able to use the gerbers to create a pcb file. I am missing a single trace. I have to remove a little of the ground plane and add a trace. Is this possible at all?

[Colin_K]

[paulvdh]

When a PCB is reverse engineered from Gerber files, it is full of DRC violations, because KiCad does not know anything about it’s netlist, except the connections implicitly implied by the existing connections. You can set: PCB Editor / Route / Interactive Router Settings to both Mode / Highlight collisions and Allow DRC violations to make extra connections.

It has been quite a while since I wrote:

Reverse engineering KiCad project from Gerber files

The goal of this reverse-engineering tutorial is to re-create a complete KiCad project from partial information assuming the only information available is a schematic in some readable, (but not EDA form, such as a .pdf or a .png picture), and a set of gerber files. The Gerber files will create a PCB with much PCB information missing, however, using this method is easier than re-designing a PCB from scratch, and can also be extended to any other program that creates Gerber files. What is “resc…

In that article I deleted the zones, re-created the schematic and replaced the pads with real footprints in further steps, and then let KiCad create new copper zones. Manually editing the copper zone to make room for the extra track will be difficult and/or cumbersome. But there is a lot of variation on how zones in gerber files are created and it depends on that. You probably want to tweak other settings of the interactive router too when you attempt this.

It is possible you can make use of the Wire It plugin. (I have no experience with it myself, and it is not available via the plugin and content manager).

[Colin_K]

I was able to use WireIt to make a net for the missing wire but in looking through your well written guide I realized that much of the board had not imported. It will clearly be faster to make the schematic. There is only about 25 components and only 5 footprints. Thank you.