Most PCBs of our last revision had issues due to the non-rounded corners of the solder mask, as described in the forum
5.99 solved it with rounded corners of the solder mask. Is there a way to solve it in a stable release of KiCad?
Rounded rectangles have been supported in KiCad stable for quite some time. This is from the current 5.1.10.
The standard KiCad libraries in 5.1.x have rounded pads on the passive RCL components but most other components have rectangular pads. Most of the built-in footprint ‘wizards’ e.g. SOIC seem to generate rectangular pads and don’t have a ‘rounded’ option - although these footprints can easily be edited post facto.
Thanks John. We use rounded pads for some footprints. However, we cannot use/switch to rounded pads for all footprints. Also, it’s anyway solved in KiCad 5.99, so I was wondering whether there is a workaround for this issue in a stable version of KiCad?
There is no way, AFAIK, within KiCad of changing all current instances of rectangular pads to rounded rectangles as these are defined at the footprint level. You might be able to achieve this by using a text editor to do a suitable find and replace. Make backup first! Not all of the footprints in 5.99 have rounded pads either though, so you need to check.
Why?
As I have read that rounded corners are better for paste deposition I am using (5.1.10) only rounded pads.
For some footprints I change “Corner size” from default 25% to lower value 20…15%.
thanks for your suggestions. My issue is really only about round edges of the solder mask (see the link in the question). With KiCad 5.1.10, the slightest misalignment of the solder mask exposes copper of the surrounding copper zone. As you suggested, rounded corners of pads lead to rounded corners of solder masks and would solve the issue (if corner size is equal or bigger than the corner size of the copper zone).
However, things change fundamentally in 5.99 as solder masks have rounded corner also for pads with non-rounded edges. So I guess I will just take the risk and use 5.99.
You can remove the automatic mask layer from a copper pad and instead add an aperture pad on the mask layer with rounded corners. But then the mask clearance is fixed for that pad.
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I haven’t thought of that, thanks
I changed the version number in the title from 5.10 to 5.1.10, as 5.10 does not exist, and you mentioned 5.1.10 in your own posts.
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