Hi. I am new to KiCad. Sorry if this question is trivial, but I can’t seem to solve it easily. Below is screen shot of my PCB board in 3D.
I have a big through-hole component on side and on the other side there are surface mount components. As seen the through hole pin appears to go through and cut through the chip board in green.
How can I make a clearance on the side with the green chip. In other words raise the green chip a bit from it it’s solder pads so that the through-hole component doesn’t touch it?
There is a row of holes along the castellated pads. If those holes are connected to the same circuits as the pads (they appear to be) then one could add pin headers to the bottom side of the green component. That would lift the green component above the PCB while still maintaining connections.
edit: On further examination, the battery holder on the other side will crash into the protruding pins unless they are cut flush with the bottom PCB.
Other than that, the problem appears to be a desire to have multiple items occupy the same space at the same time. I don’t how to do that in this universe.
Another thought. Trim the protruding leads of the battery holder flush with the top side of the battery PCB.
Thanks for your reply. What do you mean by this? You mean to trim the battery holder pins on the chip side where they come through? Would the surface mount pads for the chip then still make a contact ok I wonder.
The SMT is mounted first.
Then, the battery holder leads are trimmed so that they end up below the surface, and hand-solder carefully so that the solder wicks into the hole and solders the lead without protruding (much) above the surface.
Note that while this will work if the assembler is careful, it’s not possible to automate this assembly, so really only good for a few unit production.
You had better talk to them first.
Some assembly houses are willing to do the most absurd assembly jobs, but some won’t quote them (or, will charge a huge sum) if the board requires a lot of hand-assembly.
ETA:
This battery holder is for a Lithium coin cell, right?
Why not use something like this, instead:
I think the obvious solution is re think your design. THT components go thru the board SMT don’t these are rules that are fixed it’s your job as the designer to work this out not to ‘fudge factor’ you need to see that your design isn’t going to work and even if you go ahead you will have to deal with it. The design doesn’t work so rethink it, move stuff around or do you have more room etc. This is Electronic Design. this is what you get paid the big bucks for Yours doesn’t work.
@mousey I don’t have any more room. I’m trying to keep the PCB design as small as possible. It’s already over the dimensions limit with what I had planned.
There you go ! good thought, I think I may have seen such a beast
Edit: I don’t have any numbers for you but a quick search for ‘SMD Battery holders’ revealed all sorts I even have some !..new I had seen them before
So this device has two through hole pins and 3 locating lugs, the lugs do not go all the way through the board but the pins do . . . so a rotation of maybe 30 to 50 deg will probably fix the issue.
@pablo41 Send me the project and I’ll try it for you then we can close both of these threads.
Yours doesn’t work.
