Minimum hole to hole

The minimum hole to hole setting. Is this from hole wall to hole wall?

At least if should be because it’s the only useful interpretation. It exists because the physical tools (drill bits) may not like if the edges of the holes are too close so that they slip, bend and break.

I thought so but preferred to check before I put several hundred via’s too close together or don’t get as tight a stitch as I want.

It’s easy enough to check: just put some test vias and run the DRC.

It should be the wall thickness between two via’s.
There was some discussion about it on this forum, which leaded to change of the icons to make this a bit clearer.

As a mechanical guy I am more used to having center to center distance as a specification, but the wall thickness between via’s is a more sensible number for pcb manufacturing.

This is weird. Looking at:
Pcbnew / File / Board Setup / Design Rules and I see big grey empty area’s that can not be vanquished by resizing the window:

I think there should be some graphics and icons around the texts and it looks like this may be a bug.

Application: Pcbnew
Version: 5.1.7-a382d34a8~87~ubuntu20.04.1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 5.4.0-48-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.71.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.68.0
Compiler: GCC 9.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON

Same here, i work for a mechanical company so naturally work in pitch rather than between walls.

The window size seems to be defined by the Net Classes

Indeed, for the “Net Classes” part the window is properly filled with “stuff”.

I also did a quick search for:
https://forum.kicad.info/search?q=hole%20to%20hole%20distance%20

And the first thread that popped up has a screenshot with icons for these settings, which makes them a lot clearer.

I have not (re-) read the whole thread, my guess is these icons will appear in KiCad V6.

Yes, they’re in 6.0 (and 5.99 aka “the nightlies”).

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.