I am having struggles with zone filling in Kicad 9.0.1 on Windows. For some reason they are not connecting to selected net and rather filling in random places with small random blobs - see attached picture:
I am quite puzzled by this because it is supposed to connect by thermal relief to GND but it doesn’t for some reason. I tried switching it to other nets and it does same thing there, just in different places.
If you have any idea where to look, I’d appreciate that because I have no clue what is going on there.
I can’t upload project here but if it is needed, I can share it by other means.
That wasn’t my expectation - zones have always closed outlines. But KiCAD requires another outline drawn on another layer for them to work what doesn’t really make sense to me.
It may be counterintuitive at first, but you can think it this way: only those parts of zones which are inside the board boundaries must be filled. Otherwise you would get copper outside the board which wouldn’t be logical. If the boundaries don’t exist, zones can’t logically be filled. Also it wouldn’t be reasonable to change the filling rules when the boundaries don’t exist at all. You need the boundaries for the board in any case.
Make sense. That also means I don’t need to trace physical board dimensions preciselly with zone since it won’t fill outside of its boundaries anyways.
Yeah I used to trace the zone carefully because I had rounded board corners before I realised I could just make it a rectangle with the same dimensions as the board and the clearances would take care of the rest.
I usually draw the zones as some weird shape around the board. The zone shape itself will then be a pentagon or whatever. This makes the edge of the zone clearly visible (Oh gosh, I wish so hard for zones to be only selectable by their edge, now I get so many false positives).
The weird zone shape also helps to detect errors in the Edge.Cuts layer. Especially in the last phase when you are generating the final Gerbers and are inspecting them before you send them out for production.
If you make them the same shape as the PCB, and you accidentally deleted a rounded corner, it’s easy to miss during visual Gerber inspection (but DRC still catches it of course). But I do like redundancy in my checks. A weird pentagon is also quicker to draw than tracing over the edge of the PCB.
For completeness: Also set: PCB Editor / File / Board Setup / Design Rules / Constraints / Copper / Copper to edge clearance. (The default of 0.5mm is usually just fine.
