I’m creating a board for manufacturing and I wanted to get a stencil made for the same. I checked the F.Paste layer (there are no components on the bottom side) and all the SMD component pads have their F.Paste options checked. However, I see a blank/empty F.Paste file when I export the Gerbers. Any idea why this is happening and how can I fix this? Thanks.
OK I did some more digging and started looking at the .kicad_pcb file in a text editor. I realized that it shows the checked layers for each of the pads on the board. I didn’t see ‘F.Paste’ layer mentioned in the file even though it showed checked in pcbnew.
I went ahead and edited all the component pads in the .pretty folders (I created local copies of the footprints since browsing footprints and Cvpcb load would take an inordinate amount of time) where I unchecked and re-checked the ‘F.Paste’ boxes. I then updated all the components on the the board. Restarted KiCad and now I can see the F.Paste layer as I wanted. This was tedious and time consuming and a functionality that was supposed to work out of the box did not. Hence I think this qualifies as a bug (though not very sure).
OS?
KiCAD version?
Did you use the github repo libs for this?
Did you check the footprint files before you edited them with the editor, if they had F.Paste in the pad fields/sections (the kicad_mod files in pretty folders)?
IMHO you’d be the first to report such a problem.
OS: Windows 7, 64-bit
KICAD version: 4.0.3 stable
Not using the GitHub repos. I created a copy of all of them on my local machine and changed the fp-lib-table to operate a purely offline copy of KiCAD. However, before starting the project I made sure all SMD components for whom I wanted the pads exposed had the F.Paste box checked in their footprints. I edited the .kicad_pcb file with the editor and the footprints through the PCB footprint editor. I had initially disabled the F.Paste laye through the layers setup and enabled it right at the end. Could that be the problem?
I think to remember that at least printing does act on the current state of the pcbnew editor layer setting… wouldn’t have thought that this also affects the plot functionality.
A quick test didn’t reveal any link there… deactivating the layers in the editor and having them plot does make correct gerbers.
BZR6971 on Win7/64 here.
Will install last nightly in 10 minutes and test this again, just to make sure.
[update]
BZR7176 doesn’t show that behavior either.
So, we got an outlier here. Let’s wait if others get a similar problem, unless we can provoke it…
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