How to easily put many GND vias?

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And the last my question for today.

I’d like to put many vias connecting top GND with bottom GND. How to do it easily?
When I copy the GND via (by Ctrl+D) and put it on GND filled place it not gets being GND and also to put the next one I have to start the process from the beginning. Is there any way to put via after via all over the PCB and make them all being GND?

When I try to route track from GND via to such ‘yet not GND’ via router doesn’t allow me for it even when I switched of DRC.
This works that way under F11. Under F9 I can route to that via, but they sometimes get being GND and sometimes not. I don’t detected what decides of it. If they not, then refilling the GND zone makes wholes around them. I must have reliable method and not that sometimes works and sometimes not.

I can route switching top/bottom/top… but at top I have something else (at bottom I have only GND) so I would have to place many times 2 vias to be back on bottom to be able travel forward and than I’ll have to remove this extra vias. The best would be if those vias just be GND and I have no need to connect them with paths but only with GND copper zone I have at bottom. When I try to edit the via parameters I can’t set their net.

Till now I can’t find the enough easy way to do it but I suppose the reason can be that I have not done any PCB with kiCad yet.
I’m just testing if everything, I need, will work before starting the first PCB.

Regards
Piotr

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The term you are looking for is via stitching. It is not yet directly supported by kicad but there is an easy to use workaround. (Uses a single pad footprint and the array function of the open gl canvas)

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Or you could try using the JS Reynaud action script plugin (I think this only works in nightly versions though)

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Thanks.

You replied me faster than I read once more what I posted :slight_smile:

Piotr

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Hi John,

May be in some time in future.
Now, at my beginning with KiCad I prefer to use stable version and I don’t know how to use any script.

Piotr

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If you suggest anything that only works in nightly always remember to warn that files created by a nightly build are not guaranteed to be compatible with the stable version. Sometimes there are even problems between different nightly versions. (The nightly from yesterday can not open files created by the nightly from today.)

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Good point, well made. I have been caught by this in the past (although the fix has always been fairly straightforward - removing the diff pair setting has always worked so far … ). Nightly has been stable most of the time for me and added useful features but I have had a version that crashed unpredictably and frequently enough to be a problem. YMMV. Personally my work is not terribly critical so I am happy to play with the bleeding edge but I would be more conservative if my job depended on it!

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My method is turn off “auto delete” of old tracks, find the nearest ground point and route on the same layer as the plane to the place you want the via, this way its assigned a net, and DRC doesnt get unhappy,

For stitching an area i just move with the arrow keys, press V and keep going along the stitching path. if you look at your ground returns you rarely need to go back and randomly scatter ground via’s,

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Hello,

something fast I used is to create a bunch of vias without assigned net outside of the PCB, then select all of them and with properties change to the desired net all at the same time. Then just take them and place them where I want.

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This topic is from the time before v5. In these versions one could not place vias and expect them to connect to anything without using traces to force the connection. (Vias got their net from the trace they are connected to.)

V5 now adds a way to create vias connected to a specific net without the need for a workaround.

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