I’ve got another newbie question which I can’t figure out how to do. Maybe someone could give me a hint? Would be highly appreciated!
I’ve got my PCB cutout defined which I’m happy with for now. I can also fill GND planes in this 4-layer board. Great!
However, I want the copper filled not go right up to the cutout, but automatically leave a small clearance (to prevent any shorts between layers due to cutting).
Since my cutout is non-trivial, ideally, I’d like to just tell the zone to keep say N mils of clearance. Is that possible?
The zone can keep a clearance from the edge of the PCB in a very similar way to which it keeps a clearance from other nets in the netlist. You can set this clearance in PCB Editor / File / Board Setup / Design Rules / Constraints / Copper / Copper to edge clearance.
KiCad used to have some default clearance here (in a very old KiCad version the edge was treated as a copper track for calculating a clearance. In the latest KiCad version this clearance is unfortunately set to zero by default, which I believe is a bit unfortunate, and sometimes I think about making a feature request to set this to some sensible value by default.
