Hash pattern on F.SilkS

[mikec24]

Hi all

Kicad v 5.19 on Ubuntu Mate 20.10

First time poster, I have to say I am very impressed with Kicad

My problem though is that I am creating a board with an area of mains voltage and I would like to create a hashed area to act as a warning. The board is designed with the appropriate DMZ

Creating a fill area on F.SilksS results in a solid fill, so not what I am after

[paulvdh]

I assume this is just for silk screen?

Simplest way would be to set your grid to some suitable course value and then draw a bunch of lines & use copy & paste to multiply them. KiCad has no “advanced mechanical CAD” funtions. Just some simple drawing abilities, but whit a suitable grid and copy & Paste it’s quite easy to make regular patterns.

And oh, can you fix your version number? V5.19 does not exist. Maybe you meant V5.1.9?

[mikec24]

Thank you for your response. Yes this is for Silk Screen and to show ‘hazardous’ area. This is not going to be a production board and so I can experiment with the line drawing approach, would be nice to make this look as professional as possible

I have already had an audio power amplifier board fabricated in China and the quality of that board was very good

Yep typo in the version number, that should be 5.1.9

[Meterman2026]

That’s actually not a bad idea to clearly mark areas with mains. What about a heavy line around the area?

Thought I’d mention what I did as regards mains voltage on two boards I designed.

One, a power supply board, has the mains voltage traces on the component side (and once proved out, the solder joints carrying AC hot and neutral will be covered with RTV), and the low-voltage DC traces are all on the solder side.

The other, a signal processing board, has a ground pour that was ‘peeled back’ so the three parts on the circuit carrying mains power are isolated from ground (an off-board harness ties it into the power board).

[iabarry]

I’ve done some mechanical design in Freecad. I suspect it is possible to draw a pattern in Freecad then transfer it into Kicad.

Search this forum for Freecad and the python tool to exchange between the cad tools.

Sorry I can’t be more specific.

[paulvdh]

It is indeed possible to export (plot) to .dwg or .svg format, use any program that can work with those files, and import the result again as a graphical layer. (I’m not sure about .svg import).

What you lose this way is a simple way to make modifications.

With copy & paste you have a bunch of lines in KiCad pretty quick, but KiCad is mostly suited for simple graphics.

What method works best depends on the complexity of your hatched area.

If you’re not familiar with either of these workflows, I recommend to do them both, to learn KiCad better so you can make better decisions for when to use which method.

[mikec24]

Thank you everyone for your ideas. I did end up taking a mixture of suggestions and simply drew straight lines that I then slanted or offset to make them stand out from other vertical lines. It looks good for now and I will explore creating alternative effects in FreeCad (Did not get on with FC v0.18 but there is now v 0.19)

[eelik]

Just for your information, in the unstable development version 5.99 (nightly builds) it’s possible to use a hatch fill pattern for all zones in all layers.