GND pads issue where GND plain doesn’t by reach

I notice in V6.99 , I have a design where about 80 percent is coved by a GND plain . But I have 4 or five components with a GND pin deliberately out that plain. Kicad DRC errors these by complaining that there’s no thermal spokes connected to them. ( there’s is a pcb GND track )

So all I can do is individually mark the the footprint as having NO connection as opposed to a thermal one to the plane.

That’s fine if a bit repetitious, but then DRC errors it as now different to the footprint library which means I have to disable this check for all footprints ( which isn’t actually something I would normally do)

I don’t remember seeing this issue in V5. Perhaps logic is needed that if a ground plane is a certain minimum distance from a pad the drc check doesn’t actually fault the lack of thermal spokes

Can you share the zipped project, probably stripped to minimum to show the problem?

What exact violation are you getting? Starved thermals (ie: not enough spokes) are only in 6.99, IIRC.

If you are using 6.99, then it sound like:

(which has been fixed).

Yes starved thermals in v6.99 but that fix won’t fix my issue. My problem is Kicad can differentiate between what “ should” be covered by a ground plain and what isn’t covered

, ie the Drc check needs ignore pads that are in the net list but physically are NOT within the filled area bounding box.

Not easy to strip , it’s a complex project

It’s easy to recreate il do a simple project to illustrate the issue.

It just if you have pads in a net that deliberately are not connecting to a ground plane , then drc gives you a thermal starvation error even though the ground plane would never connect to these pads.

There are workarounds but really DRC needs to have a boundary setting where it does not attempt to adjudicate on starved thermals.

So what DRC error are you getting: just “unconnected” (with a ratsnest line)?

In my case I have already run a track out fron the ground plane to the pad in question.

The DRC gives a thermal starvation error even though the pad is connected via the my track to the ground plane

Did you update to the latest nightly? I had something similar about 2 weeks ago, but it is solved now.

My nightly about a week old

Ok. I checked: the last fix was 5 days ago. So: maybe update?

Will do thanks.

Dave z

Thanks straubm, the latest nightlies fix the problem

dave

I think you should not name v6.99 as V6. This misleads the readers.

2 Likes

just a typo, fixed now

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