Hi, there was an old (closed) thread in 2020 about the possibility to have/use square vias in Kicad (Change via shape (square, octagonal); maybe the newer versions offer this chance…
My problem is: I have to design a 6-layers board for a ceramic thick film process, where the connections from one layer to another are made by overlapping the tracks using a square hole that (as you know) it is not drilled, but directly formed by an aperture in the dielectric between the tracks and filled with metal.
A collegue of mine suggested to use square test points over the Kicad round vias, but:
I do not know if it is possible for the test point to go “squarely” to the inner layer;
I have hundreds of vias, also blind and buried, so the process could be very tedious (and probably prones to errors);
I am not sure what the DRC will do if it find a round vias overlapped by a square test point (with square inner layers).
Any hints?
Thanks
Temistocle
Just out of curiosity (I don’t know anything about this process): why do the apertures have to be square? And the track ends are round anyways [in KiCAD].
Besides that the easiest way would be maybe to write a script which adds square apertures at all via locations/connected layers.
Hi ekoeck, thank you for your reply. I am not an expert of thick film deposition; we are using this process becuase in our project we need a support (ceramic board) to hold a BIG silicon sensor (they have a very similar CTE that allow low temperature operation).
I do not really know why the vias in that process need to be square; I think they want to maximize the overlapped area between traces, so the tracks are also bigger where they are overlapped.
I never used a script in Kicad, only the usual layout GUI. Is there a tutorial somewhere?
Vias in KiCad are always circular. In V9 the circles can have different diameters on different layers. Supporting non-circular shapes for vias is more complex than for pads and since there wasn’t a clear demand for it, I didn’t spend the time on it.
I did wonder if the OP @Temistocle was talking about vias (the hole) or via pads . . . I assumed pads in the end, especially bearing in mind the link posted was also talking about pads
There is some information in the official documentation. Besides that I just saw that there is a plugin in the plugin manager called “Oktizer Action Plugin” which supposedly can turn your vias into octagons (haven’t tried it, though). Well since it is only a Python script you can edit on your own this maybe is already 90% of the work and you only have to modify the source code to change the vias into squares instead.
You could always reach out to the maintainer of the plugin and ask them if they would consider adding this feature to the plugin as well. Maybe you are lucky
That’s a good hint: I would like to PM mgyger (Markus Gyger) here, but I cannot… maybe I am too newbie to have the right permissions.
I can try on Gitlab, but I am not a member, so I do not want to start a “fake” project there only to contact Markus. But it could be the last chance…
