Teardrop issue, anyone seen this before ? (V8.0.x)

RaptorUK · April 26, 2024, 1:19pm

Hi folks,

I’m getting a weird teardop/filled zone interaction that I haven’t been able to reproduce in a test project, it appears when I hit “B” to refill the zones but looks OK when I open the project. Just wondered if anyone had seen anything similar ?

When the zones are refilled . .

when the project is opened . . .

Version info:

Application: KiCad x64 on x64

Version: 8.0.2-rc2, release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.4
FreeType 2.12.1
HarfBuzz 8.3.0
FontConfig 2.14.2
libcurl/8.5.0-DEV Schannel zlib/1.3

Platform: Windows 10 (build 19045), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW

Build Info:
Date: Apr 20 2024 05:22:23
wxWidgets: 3.2.4 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.83.0
OCC: 7.7.1
Curl: 8.5.0-DEV
ngspice: 42
Compiler: Visual C++ 1936 without C++ ABI

Build settings:

jmk · April 26, 2024, 1:28pm

Sorry, I haven’t tried, but I will comment on these “Bumps”. They don’t look very promising.

It looks like the zone has invaded the clearance. Doesn’t happen on the RST pad below.
Looking closer, the same problem on TDI pad. This seems to happen with two teardrops on the one pad.

Do you have different clearance settings?

RaptorUK · April 26, 2024, 1:53pm

Not as far as I can tell, all the overrides (I checked RST, TDO & TDI) for top and bottom layer pads are all zero.

mousey · April 26, 2024, 8:57pm

It looks like the ‘teardrops’ are obeying the clearance rule and keeping out ? how can that be? I have never used them but are there many parameters that can even be changed within Kicad ?

RaptorUK · April 27, 2024, 2:29pm

In V8 they are part of the individual pad properties.

paulvdh · April 27, 2024, 11:30pm

It looks like those teardrops have thermal reliefs. I thought teardrops are made of similar constructs as zones and you could select them in KiCad V7 to examime their properties. (Them being zones explains whey can have Thermal reliefs, but still it’s probably a bug as the combination does not make sense to me). In KiCad V8, I can not seem to select teardrops at all, or with any other function then Schematic Editor / Edit / Edit Teardrops.

Yes, but they are also in the Board setup:

And you can also create custom teardrops in: **Schematic Editor / Edit / Edit Teardrops:

I guess it’s similar to clearances. You can set those too in multiple locations, and there are fixed rules to either inherit or overrule the settings from another “level”.

davidsrsb · April 28, 2024, 4:38am

My opinion is that a teardrop to a pad and a thermal relief is not a valid combination. The only technical purpose of a teardrop is to strengthen the copper connection to the pad - useful for heavy components like transformers and switches

RaptorUK · May 7, 2024, 8:38am

To give a little more background . . . this project started life in Solidworks PCB and is now in KiCad, I’m trying to clean it up as much as possible before I carry out some major redesign work.

When I update the PCB (F8) I get these warnings related to the teardrops, I’ve tried to go through and make sure all the Solidworks teardrops are removed but I still have these warnings and can’t figure out why (so far).