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.
Ok, so I need a 3 pad open solder jumper on my PCB, and there are 3 choices, shown below. What are the pros and cons of them, or does it not matter, given that it’s just a small feature and trivial to solder a bridge over.
Ignore the difference in size, I think there are comparable size ones in each style.
Study the ipc standard for seats and you will not have many questions… It takes a very long time and a lot to paint why so… All this is related to smt soldering technology… in short, ipc implies primitives for seats… in turn, this is due to the application of solder paste with a stencil thickness, the distance between the terminals and the size…
Thanks for chipping in with your expertise but I’m not getting them assembled. I’m just going to put solder wire or paste over one gap, apply the iron and be done with it. Studying the IPC is total overkill for a hobby board with lots of space. Unless there are compelling arguments, I’ll probably go with the rounded footprint.
I’ve made jumpers like that in 0603 and 0402 sizes. I have tried them different ways and sometimes I like silk ID of the two positions with A and B:
Or, if I don’t have the space for the letters:
And a default short is handy as well for when you don’t expect it to change but may need to hack it open with an xacto:
Those have gaps of about 0.35mm which is pretty easy to do a solder blob, but you can cut the gap down to 0.2 or so for a bit easier blobbing.
As for the other shapes, it seems like they are just aesthetic, but I don’t know if there is any other reason. Good-old rectangular pads have never been a problem for me.
There are general design rules for everyone based on these rules based on the development of kicad if you do not want to study then get errors… To describe in a nutshell why and why all electronics are not possible according to a certain standard and this is the basis… You can just put solder in a jar and you need to put it on the board correctly so that there are no jumpers and there are short circuits… On large parts, manufacturers give a futprint in the description if you use them, the probability of error is minimal
It shouldn’t matter. The chevron style might be a little easier to bridge due to the larger edge length, but mostly it looks just fancy. The rounding of the outer pads won’t matter at all.
You’re wrong with the rounding… At a minimum, the round reduces the contact area and increases the clearance at the corners to the adjacent component. Usually you have more than one part on the board so you should look at a specific board… You also do not take into account that the round on the board will lead to a change in the herber of the stencil file, which cannot be edited in kicad
Yes, you can, but you don’t really need to. It depends on how easy you want the bridge to be created. If it’s created too easily, you might create a bridge that’s hard to remove. Or with HASL surface finish, solder could unintentionally flow into the gap between the pads during production or during reflow. Solder mask would avoid that.
It really dosent matter, it’s whatever suits your board or physically fits unless you have some electrical constraint. There are 3 to choose from or as I am sure you know that is very easy to create your own custom jumper pad with KICAD ! let your hair down and go wild
This may be inconsistent with your needs due to space used or some other issue, but I use 0603 0 Ω resistors with their normal footprints. Mouser lists them (YAGEO brand) from $0.10 / 1 to $5 / 1000 (USD). I should say when I’ve done this it’s usually just one bit - you’d need 2x 0603 footprints. I keep a supply of 0 ohm resistors on hand for this purpose.
The Mouser site gives a tolerance of 5% which would yield a perfect 0 ohms if true.
