I am trying to place a surface mount component onto a copper zone and it seems like there is some kind of a boundary issue that keeps the component pads from being fully connected to the copper zone.
Below is an image showing the board layout as I have it in KiCad and how the gerber files look when viewing them. You can see that in the layout file I have resistor R3 placed right in-between the two copper layers, but in the gerber view there is a large circular keep out zone around the pads of the resistor that prevents it from being fully connected to the zones.
I have made sure that both the pad and zone connection types are set to “Solid” and not “Thermal Relief” and I have looked at the actual footprint of the resistor component to try and remove any settings that may be causing this, but I haven’t found any. How can I accomplish this so that both pads of the resistor can be fully connected to each copper zone?
Image of gerber file view and what the layout file looks like in KiCad
Hard to say from this but I see two ‘rat lines’ leading to the zones are they connected correctly ? are constraints and clearances set correctly because it looks like the copper pour hasn’t completed. Can you remove R3 and the zone fills as you expect ? I take it the resistor is bridging between two seperate zones so they are electrically isolated from each other. Personally I would double check constraints and clearance settings first.
Thanks for your reply, I tried removing R3 and the zones filled a little better but still not as expected as seen in the image. This is a daughter board that connects to another board not shown in the image so the rat lines are expected in this case.
You are right that adjusting the clearing settings helped, I changed both zones clearance to 0 to see what would happen and both zones filled the pads almost entirely but there was still an oval shape between them where the zone did not fill. I also set the thermal relief to as low as it would go with the same results.
Is there another clearance / constraint you would recommend changing? This is also a 0603 footprint which is very small, I changed the footprint to a 0805 which allows for quite a lot more room between the pads and both zones filled correctly. I would prefer to use 0603 if possible but maybe the gap is just too small?
