SMD circular pad

Hi,

I’m trying to create a touch pad for a project, it has to be a smd circular pad without a copper fill in the middle, basically a thick round trace around the board perimeter. I can’t use a tru hole because i’m placing the components there. Any ideas how to create those?

Thanks!

Aaron

I need some kind of ring trace not a filled pad.

At the moment for the stable release the best way to do this is to use a simple SMD pad and use other software to generate the sequence of straight tracks to mimic your circular patch, then cut/paste into the kicad_pcb file. Alternatively, you can have a look at the custom shaped pads patch mentioned here:

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You can build the ring outside of KiCAD with this python script and copy&paste the output into your kicad_pcb file and reload the layout.

If you connect a net to it via a track deactivate DRC beforehand ( >Preferences>General) and after you connected it activate DRC again. The copper arc/ring track will then ‘join’ the net and KiCAD will remember that.

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