Hello I am having a bit of trouble figuring out why there is an invisible surrounding area when I go to draw filled zones next to each other?
I am trying to prevent that if that is possible and I am trying to look everywhere to find out how to stop that from happening.
For a bit of background I am trying to make a stylophone inspired synthesizer and I’d like to have each key shape replicate the original. So I imported the geometry for the keys as a .dxf file that I made in illustrator. Right now I am trying to get it so the front mask layer is exposing the front copper layer and I want the outline width to match the .dxf drawing. However when I go to add a draw fill zone next to a previous one it has that invisible surrounding area to it that I’m not sure what it is?
I’d appreciate the help if anyone has any suggestions as to why this is happening and if there’s a way to prevent it.
There has to be a gap between copper zones of different nets, or else they will short circuit to each other. And there are different ways to adjust the (minimum) gap width. You can set it in the zone properties, or you can create custom rules.
Alternatively, you can use graphic polygons instead of zones. Graphic objects always maintain the shape in the way you draw them. KiCad does not modify them. As a result, you are responsible yourself for creating enough isolation distance between the area’s so it can be manufactured.
I had a look of what a “stylophone” looks like:
The “keyboard” layout is fairly simple and repetitive. I would probably have drawn this completely inside KiCad myself. The keys have just a handful of different sizes and it’s quite easy to make footprints for the keys. One thing to watch out for is how to fit them on a suitable grid. KiCad’s drawing capabilities are quite limited, but they are good enough to do something like this.
Also, when importing from DXF, you do not want a drawing of the whole keyboard, but you would want a separate drawing for each key. Drawing the keys directly in KiCad is maybe a bit more work then drawing them in an external CAD program, but you recoup a part of that effort by skipping the import steps, and directly having objects that work nicely inside KiCad itself.
