Filling zones with automatic pullback from cutout

Hi all,

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?

Here is what I got:

Thanks so much!

Cheers,
/Tobias

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.

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Absolutely fantastic!! It works perfectly=) Thank you so much for your super fast and to the point help!

FWIW, here is a close-up of the result with 0.5mm copper-to-edge clearance:

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