Hello! I am new to Kicad and also totally new to pcb design. I have started using KiCad 5 days ago (tutorials on Youtube) and I am designing my own pcb already. I want to fill my upper layer to be a GND plane. Every pin was successfully connected to GND expect three pins, all on the ATMEGA328 (see photo below).
I don’t know why this happened. If I try to connected one pin to the ground plane this happens (see photo below). I am not sure if it is successfully connected now.
I will be very happy for any kind of help.
Thank you in advance!
Thank you for your quick replies. Although I changed settings I didn’t solve the problem. One more photo is below. You can see that it connects to other GND pins except those on the ATMEGA328.
It definitely looks like a clearance / min width issue. Try changing these settings in the Zone Properties. Or post a screen shot of your Zone Properties dialog.
The first figure shows my initial (default) settings. The second is the one I changed. I tried other values as well, but I must admit that I have not experience of this.
The default settings should have been okay. Are you sure you are pressing the ‘B’ key to refill all zones? I don’t know if the shortcut keys change for different languages. You can press the ‘?’ key and look for “Fill or Refill all zones”, it’s at the bottom of my list.
Or something like: “Ispunite ili ponovno napunite sve zone”
At one moment the fill appeared inside the chip ATMEGA328 but it was still not connected to the GND pins of the chip from the outside, just from the inside. STRANGE. Now I can’t get back in that state to make a photo…
Often I find the zone fill doesn’t quite get everywhere, I usually work around it by connecting a trace between pads. It has to be pad to pad, not pad to zone, i.e. you can’t leave a trace dangling into a zone and have it connect (I think that works in Eagle).
bobc I guess I will do the same if I don’t solve it any other way. Thanks!
@jwpartain1 I don’t understand why the C5 has to be removed. Isn’t that a standart technique to connect a crystal to two capacitors and than capacitors to ground?
I have done it as @bobc suggested - connecting GND pad from U2 chip to another gnd pad. The space inside the chip became filled up with ground. I guess we solved the problem, I don’t know if it is a good way but I suppose it works. Any comments on this are very welcome
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Your circuit architecture is correct. DO NOT remove the physical component C5. The problem is the silk-screen reference designator, “Y1”. It is located on top of pad2 of C5. The silk-screen ink on the bare copper will interfere with soldering C5 to the board.
(The DRC in KiCAD does not look for silkscreen violations. The board designer must do this on his own before sending Gerbers to a board fabricator. Some fabricators will find an error like this and remove the silk-screen from the bare copper - perhaps leaving behind an illegible spattering of silkscreen where the lettering was supposed to be. Other fabricators will build the board as designed, and let the designer figure out how to salvage the boards.)
