I am new to kicad, I’ve used eagle several times however it’s been a while since I have touched any pcb production software and I’m pretty novice to it all.
I have added a ground plane to the front and back of my board in the pcb view by defining a filled zone and then filling it. using the gnd net. When I check for errors I get this error
thermal relief connection to zone incomplete (board setup constraints zone fill strategy min spoke count 2; actual 1;)
I have tried to solve this but I don’t really know what the issue is and I can’t seem to find (or understand) any similar issues others have had.
Here’s a picture of my board. I’m using a custom outline, could that be causing an issue?
Any help or leads on how to solve this would be much appreciated.
You could also consider changing the rotation of the thermal relief spokes by 45 degrees which often allows more than one spoke to connect to the plane
Would that be a better way to do it? I’m pretty out of my depth here in that I don’t really know why I would want more than one spoke. Now that I have updated it and there is no error it still seems to have more than one spoke going to the ground plane anyway.
In general, a good connection to the GND plane is very important, and using more spokes lower the impedance, but it’s irrelevant for a simple design like this. A quick way around it is o manually draw a track from the “offending pad” to some other pad (so it won’t leave the end “dangling”)
Another possible problem is the hole in the upper left corner. It is connected to a very thin track, and this may develop a hairline fracture when connected to a big pad (that is also in a narrow section of the PCB, and subject to a relatively high amount of mechanical stress). You can either use teardrops (Native support in KiCad V7) or a much wider track to connect to that pad to remedy this.
KiCad has built in support for teardrops these days with: PCB Editor / Tools / Add Teardrops. By adding teardrops, the transition between the track and the pad becomes gradual, and this removes the stress points in the corners. It is not the thin track in itself that is the problem, it is the sharp transition between a big pad and a narrow track, that causes stress riser points and possible fractures.
Bumped into DRC issue today on a 1.27mm small pin header with pins connection to GND layer. Changed the pad to solid instead of thermal relief. For small pads that shouldn’t be a problem and also gives a good ground connection.
