Is there any way to lock filled zones or prevent refilling them?
It’s often useful to combine several boards to one panel before sending them to the manufacturer.
BUT: If I design a board with filled zones, and then copy-and-paste it to another layout to build the panel, KiCad thinks the zones are outdated, and refilling them completely destroys the filled zones (=filled zones are now isolated from every other signal).
That’s especially bad for manufacturers who directly accept KiCad files – now it’s not possible to send the combined KiCad file to the manufacturer, without destroying the fills. The only way, is to use Gerber again, and select “Continue without refill”.
So, is there any way to prevent the refill / tell KiCad that it should not touch them, and that they are not outdated?
IMO the append board feature of pcbnew leaves things to be desired when used to combine boards. Another thing it doesn’t do is rename references to not clash. I think panelling is better done with other programs. Have you tried something like KiKit which will also add the joins of choice?
Thanks! The “append board” feature seems to work (although it shows a strange ratsnest when appending multiple boards, but this can probably be ignored).
Unfortunately KiCad tries to hide this feature, so “append board” is hard to find:
“File -> Append Board…” is unfortunately hidden by default, and only shown when pcbnew is started directly… (Showing but disabling this menu-item, a menu-item which tells the user to start in standalone mode, or moving the menu-item to Tools would be much better.)
Thanks also for telling me about KiKit; but in my case (assembling several different boards manually to 1 panel for prototyping), it would probably not help.
I think it’s deliberate that append is only available in standalone mode.
I am not certain but I don’t think KiKit is limited to panelising only one design. There seems to be an example given of combining designs on a panel: https://cadlab.io/project/22740/master/files