I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.
Hi,
When running a DRC, I’m getting a bunch of clearance violations due to the pads of imported footprints being too close.
It also throws errors on small resistors whose pads are less than 0.2mm apart as shown below:
I guess I just want to know if these errors can be ignored. Also, why would the default design rules cause errors on small resistors? Also, is there any way to make this work with no errors (I guess I’d have to decrease the default clearance to 0?)
The default design rules are selected to be conservative across a variety of common (cheap) manufacturers. The libraries include both common components and uncommon components, regardless of whether they would be easily manufacturable.
It looks like you have selected a very small passive part, which genuinely may not be manufacturable by most turnkey fabs. If you absolutely need that part, you’ll need to find a specific fab house and set up the KiCad design rules to match what the fab tells you they can do.
I guess I’d have to decrease the default clearance to 0?
This proposal means: no clearance between different copper nets → thats the definition of a short circuit. And most pcb-designers try to avoid a short circuit.
set the clearance to the values you get from your board manufacturer. If it still throws errors your board probably won’t be produced without unwanted shorts, so in this case either use bigger footprints with more clearance or change your board manufacturer to someone who can produce your design.
It’s not uncommon to have some small-pitched component but to keep the default minimum clearances otherwise larger. You can change the pad clearance for individual footprints (all of its pads) or even individual pads in the footprint/pad properties.
But in this case I suggest rather checking the datasheet of the component for the recommended land patter. Even the standard 0201 resistor footprint in the KiCad library has 0.18 mm gap between the pads which is enough for many low cost manufacturers nowadays.
If you are new to this, be aware that components this small will cause difficulties if you need to handle them manually, and correct footprint is critical for automatic assembly. Even wrong kind of track width and positioning may cause tombstoning or other assembly problems.
