Whenever I run DRC I keep getting a lot of ‘solder mask aperture bridges items with different nets’ errors - I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong or how to fix this
I’m using footprints that I’ve found online and when I check the gerbers in GerbView, the solder mask seems to be applied in the correct places on both sides of the board.
These are the first boards I’ve made and I’m a bit tentative to send them off for production after seeing these errors as I’m worried it will cause issues when I start trying to solder wires to the pads -
In any case this lack of nets explains the messages. Two items with no net aren’t part of the same net and are interpreted as belonging to different nets. A mask opening of a pad exposes the track attached to it.
In this case would it be okay to go ahead and upload the Gerber files for production?
I skipped over making the schematic as the PCB doesn’t have any components - just some drill holes for attaching mechanical switches and some pads and traces for connecting the board to another board.
I did have a go but the tutorials I watched always had power supplies and resistors etc. and I wasn’t sure how to go about designing my boards schematic
They are switches. Someone is going to push them, maybe often. You don’t pay extra for copper, so make the pads and tracks far more robust to cope with the use they may get.
Although they are switches, each pin and each pad have a number. Those must match.
You may find after “Updating…” , your footprints may be reversed with respect to the symbols. In your case, because the PCB is complete, simply mirror the symbols to get the correct pad/pin associations, then Update again.
Hopefully the pads for the switch mounts are okay, I took the footprint from github.
The pads are currently 1.524mm diameter pads with a 0.762mm diameter hole.
The traces are 0.35mm width - the switches will be getting a lot of use but I wasn’t sure if more than 0.35mm was necessary as the board will only be hooked up to 3.3V.
I can certainly make the pads and traces larger/wider though if that’s advisible
Voltage and current didn’t concern me, it was the mechanical robustness and consequent life expectancy that troubled me.
Very small pads attached to thin tracks have a tendency to crack and break far more than big pads with fat tracks.
Thanks for the heads up, I’ll make sure I revisit this before exporting the gerber files again - would 2.2mm pads and 0.5mm tracks work? Or should I just go as large as I can whilst ensuring there is enough gap between traces and they are not too close to the edge of the board?
Would it be better to increase the pad sizes that the switches attach to or should I leave those be?
I spent a while trying to figure this out and noticed that there are 4 pins allocated in the symbol, so it’s throwing the error because I’ve allocated it to a switch footprint that only has two pins. I didn’t want to tamper with this and cause more errors:
Also when I select the left pin of the switch on the schematic it selects the top pad on the PCB so it seems like it has linked correctly, but it doesn’t do the same for the right-side pin and I couldn’t see a way to link it manually…
