How to keep bare copper tracks/areas to be tinned?

I need to send my gerbers to JLCPCB and at the same time, I need that some track and some ground area, are not covered. they should be bare copper (not masked) so that during the tinning, the tin covers these areas.

How can I get it please?
Because the “keep out” area" is working only on the copper and not on the mask layers.

Just draw the closed shape you want to be mask-free on the relevant mask layer. It will subtract from the mask, thus baring the copper, which will be coated by the subsequent treatment, e.g. HASL. Another trick is to put text on the mask, thus making the text show up on the copper layer.

Let’s see if I correctly understood:

  • Select the Mask layer I cant to have the free zone
  • Place > Keep Out Area (Ctrl+Shift+K)
  • It asks to what layer bound the area.
  • But I have not choice to select any MASK Layer. Hence I select just the side (Front or Back, according ot the Mask layer selected)
  • Draw the area
  • Save it
    and it’s done?

It’s not a keep out area, it’s just a normal area, created with the polyline tool.

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SO I slect the Mask Layer I draw a geometric shape and that’s it?

Actually I forgot that it needs to be a filled area so use the graphic polygon tool.

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Thank you so much. Your suggestion was really helpful

No worries. Happy holidays! :cake:

I remember recently @maui mentioning that his RF plugin suite has a tool that will do this. Apparently for RF signal reasons keeping the mask away from tracks can also be important. Check out his plugins here https://github.com/easyw/RF-tools-KiCAD for the “Solder Mask Expander (Action Plugin)” tool that should be able to do what you want with only a couple clicks (and some experimentation to see how to abuse the tool for your own application).

FWIW, I haven’t used this plugin myself so YMMV.

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Ideally, you would be able to mark track segments as also being defined on the solder mask layer, so the solder mask cutout moves with the track as it gets pushed and shoved around.
This clearance should be a separate value from the solder mask clearance for pads, and a negative clearance will of course keep it narrower then the copper track itself.

I have not checked, but there may already be an issue for this on gitlab.

This is were I fall down just because I have not so much practice with plugin installation on kiCAD.
It says to install into the plugin dir.

What should I do exactly? To download everything, creating a dir into the plugin directory (which one?) and then copy everything there?

The location of plugins is operating system dependent. On my linux box it’s probably ~/.local/share/kicad. I’m guessing that for windows it’s in the “Appdata” directory.

The new (to come) (& almost ready) KiCad V6 has a plugin manager.
At the moment not many plugins are available via the plugin manager, because it was introduced very recently (several weeks ago) and many writers of plugins are also waiting for KiCad V6 to stabilize before they adapt their plugins for it.

So in the next few months you can expect the number of plugins available via the plugin manager to grow.

I just installed the version 6.
I see there are several huge improvements.
I installed also the plugins via the plugin manager. I discovered it immediately

Although opening a recent project made with 5.1.12, it doesn’t find any 3D model. Now Im’ struggling with

Most likely cause is that the path variable is not correct.

Have a look at: KiCad Project Manger / Preverences / Configure Paths and then the path in the KISYS3DMOD variable.

For me it seems to have changed a few times in the nightlies in the last few months. (That’s ok for nightlies). At the moment such things are still a bit changing as the final steps to make KiCad V6 ready for release (and moving the nightlies to V6.9.9) are in progress at the moment.

To avoid to pollute this thread, I opened another one, and I removed the old messages here, moving the content up there
Here the link please. I mentioned you also for the help you tried to give: https://forum.kicad.info/t/kicad-6-0-all-the-3d-models-are-not-loaded/32664

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