Possible to force unconnected copper fill to save on etching chemicals?

[eelik]

@John_Pateman

Looking at your original board - try moving the triple connector that is bottom right up or to the lefta shade. I bet the area to the right of the board will then fill. Filling the rest of the board is left as an exercise

This is good, practical strategy. You may also try to make the minimum width of the zone smaller (as small as the normal track width) if it’s not small enough already. In your original picture there seems to be good possibility to fill maybe 3/4 or more of the empty space in the green layer if you just move some tracks and vias without rerouting, provided that you get one connection behind a connector footprint as John suggested.

[davidsrsb]

This is an example where fragment inside the GNDS zone are not filled with GNDS as there is no available connection, but then are not flooded with no net either. Arrows point to what I think is an error

[davidsrsb]

I have registered https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1811239

[hedefalk]

@John_Pateman

Looking at your original board - try moving the triple connector that is bottom right up or to the lefta shade. I bet the area to the right of the board will then fill. Filling the rest of the board is left as an exercise

I wish I could but these are panel mounted WH148 pots, holes already written, not in stone, but well in plastic, PETG to be specific

Like this, but I’m not going the no-plan whatsoever wiring approach again:

I’m doing the pots pcb mounted this time and just wiring to jacks which will be alot easier

I might get away with extending the board downwards a tiny but though… I should have 3.5mm according to this which should leave me with one more mm almost:

You may also try to make the minimum width of the zone smaller (as small as the normal track width) if it’s not small enough already.

Yeah, for these to be hand-made boards I try to keep margins high not to bridge anything

Anyways, thanks all for all good suggestions! For my current use case I’m all good, I’ll manage and I’ve learnt a lot. And thanks @davidsrsb for the report, I’ll follow progress there!

[davidsrsb]

The bug has been marked “wishlist”
Personally, I disagree as my opinion is that the fill algorithm, which is already a special case, should all empty islands regardless of other zones it overlaps. Anyway this might have to be a V6 thing as it would affect Gerber output in existing V5 projects.
It would help if those commenting in this thread click “This bug affects you”

edit Seth has committed a patch https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-source-mirror/commit/6b75f589e94315f7c0ee0c11906ef5f4004ade23
This should be in tomorrows Nightly

[davidsrsb]

A bit better now with Seths patch, but isolated areas inside other higher priority zones still do not get flooded with copper.
The special case needs some more complex logic

[Dave05]

@PCB_Wiz

That natural priority, that looks to be already in there, could give a quite useful “keep isolated copper” control by area, if they just remove the strange DRC message. (eg maybe allow ‘no net’ with same priority level, to do this else fill ? )

It seems to me that the DRC error should be there. The zone filling issue should be fixed. As stated in another post, the fill issue remains even when the lower priority zone is on a net. That means that in the present state we need to very clearly define non-overlapping boundaries for zones, and that can take some considerable time in addition to being very inconvenient. The whole point behind assigning priorities to zones is to have the lower priority zones create a fill in areas that were not filled by the higher priority zones.