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

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:

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

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?

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

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 ?
:mouse:

In V8 they are part of the individual pad properties.

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”.

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

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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).

image

there are 18 warnings shown . . . I have more than 18 pads with teardrops so the warnings are not on all pads with teardrops.

My test project (which I can post) does not have any warnings.

Test-Teardrop.zip (17.8 KB)

Finally getting to the bottom of this . . .

Will update when I’ve finished fixing all the errors/warnings, and hopefully post a test project that reproduces this issue.

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