Yesterday, I opened KiCad for the first time. The design I want to modify has these blue elements:
From what I found out, this seems to be a copper zone. I don’t want the zone to be visible on the finished PCB, so I searched for a way to remove them. However, the only thing I found was the “Zone Properties” menu. I expected to find a visual editor, where I can just click on the zone and delete it.
Can anyone tell me how I can get rid of the shown zones?
click onto zone selects the zones → delete
depending on the used kicad version (advice for your next opened issue: always mention the used kicad version) you have to enable zone selecting in the selection filter (bottom right corner of screen).
Thanks for the reply! I’m using KiCad 8. Thanks for pointing that out!
I think it seems to be a hole in the F.Cu layer! When I hide the B.Cu layer, it looks like this:
and if I click on “fill all zones”, the black spots disappear. But unfortunately all other black spots disappear too. I can’t select the holes though. If I click on a black spot, nothing happens. If I click on the red spot right below the holes, the entire F.Cu layer is selected.
That is the way zones work. They punch out holes wherever there is an object in the way. So whatever object created those “black spots” is missing and needs to be re-added if you want to keep them (it could be a rule area / copper keepout, or some other shape that collides with copper)
It looks that these holes were made by placing something on top layer then filling zones and then deleting these something.
To try it… Select (at right side) Top layer. Using X hotkey you should be able to place a track segment (it will be no-net track) then when zone will be filled your track should generate a hole.
If all holes were done the same way their functionality is probably the same = no functionality.
It looks your problem is solved.
But from unknown reason you want some of holes be back. Why, how many of them how they look.
I believe PCB should not be designed that way that refilling zones changes anything.
Thanks for the reply! Honestly, I just don’t want the holes to be visible on the finished PCB. It looks, like that will not be an issue though. Previously I thought, that the pattern will be exposed copper on the PCB.
Related to zones, I recently had a design with multiple zones on a layer. I wanted to list them, primarily so I could review and adjust the zone priorities… but couldn’t find anything to do it.
I ended up doing it manually with a bit of paper. Is there a menu item that lists zones (and would allow editing)?
You can use PCB Editor / View / Show Properties Manager and then select a single item (such as a zone) to show it’s properties.
I am also not aware of a way to get an overview (table?) of the properties of all zones. This would also imply some way to identify which zone is which, but zones do not have unique names. You can make some text notes on one of the user layers, but that is not much different from some scribbles on a dead tree carcass.
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