Filled zone & Layers

Layout
41

I am not so confident to give you that kind of assurance. Maybe you should collect more comments.

One thing I would do is cover the whole board with the fill instead of leaving a border. As you can see from the screenshot of a project of mine the fill boundary indicated by the hatched rectangle can be on the board edge or even beyond. KiCad will just trim the fill to the area of the board (and even the rounded corners), minus a clearance.

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42

I can see that your mounting holes have a cooper ring on F.Cu (and certainly on B.Cu)

I don’t want that on my board because the GND will be connected to chassis thru a diode network, but it’s interesting for me to learn how did you do so ?

Regards (and thank you one more time for your support)

43

They have a copper annular ring but they are not connected to any net. It’s just a different footprint from the library. I could have used a plain hole but I experiment with various stuff.

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44

To do it properly / nicely.

  1. Add Mounting hole with Pad symbols to your schematic (Yes, you can add holes to your schematic :slight_smile: )
  2. Connect these mounting holes to the GND net.
  3. Assign mounting hole footprints to them, just as with any other footprint.
  4. When drawing the PCB. set the zone connecction of these footprints to “solid”. (You can also keep the thermal spokes if you wish.

The biggest advantage here is that the solder mask will be removed from these holes, and that is quite important for a good electrical connection. Some of KiCad’s mounting holes have via’s though the copper pad. The reason is that this makes the pad adhere to the copper a lot stronger. You don’t just depend on the epoxy holding the copper in place. (Although, when you use “solid” and thus remove the thermal reliefs, it’s also already quite robust, but your manufacturer does not charge you extra for those via’s either)

45

Remember till the end of your days. :slight_smile:
PCB design software is not a simple graphic editor with gerber as output format.

The main PCB program task is to keep eyes on you while you are designing PCB to ensure that resulted PCB is in accordance with schematic. At schematic you easily see what should be connected with what, while at PCB you can easier make mistake.
If you want to have it looking at your hands than you have to tell KiCad all connections that should be accepted. You do it by drawing schematic.
If you don’t - you can set ‘Route - Interactive Router Settings’ to ‘Highlight collisions’ and KiCad will allow you to do whatever you want, but you loose 90% of program functionality. Your choice.

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