Here’s a “best practices” question for you. If I’ve got a trace on a given net running between some pads and I wish to replace that trace with a pour, should I :
Remove that trace and replace the trace with a pour?
Leave the trace in place and add a pour “on top” of the trace?
How would you do it and why? I’m guessing there’s way everybody does it, and that it exists for a reason. If there isn’t a good reason, it’s personal preference – and so I’ll leave the trace in there and pour over it.
There was some mention in another thread that some still run traces to all ground pins even if using a ground plane. I’d say that favors a pour over approach.
Oh – that sounds like a major undertaking. I haven’t connected traces to any ground pins (would be a lot of work!). I was talking about a different net. But if they don’t have reservations about pouring over traces, I’m cool with that. Thanks.
I do pour over. 2 or 4 layers. 2 layers, ground = bottom layer.
4 layers, ground = internal 1, most common voltage supply = internal 2. But it makes it difficult to remove components during prototyping on 4 layers.
I route ground last, assuming a ground plane.
I route power tracks manually thicker, as direct as possible, so that the intent is clear.
That may have been me. My habit is to rout a trace to all pins in a net, even if it’s within a copper pour (fill zone). That assures me that the copper pour will be able to establish connectivity to all points that require it. If vias are needed at any point in a net assigned to a fill zone, I can control where the vias are placed.
(One of the layout tools I used in a prior incarnation actually required explicit tracks to all pins in a net. If you had a pin that connected to only a copper pour (no traces to any other pin in the net), it triggered a DRC squawk. I don’t recall which layout program behaved that way but I have persisted with the habit even though it’s not required by KiCAD.)
I ended up not running traces before I poured, thanks for your input.
I’m curious what the official method for connecting a trace to a pour is, though (separate but related question). Do you just end the trace somewhere within the bounds of the pour, or is there a “more proper” way? All the traces I connect to pours I simply end inside the pour, and that seems to work .
That’s definitely a reasonable question. Since it’s my practice to place traces even within fill zones I don’t have an answer to it.
As you suggest, simply ending a trace somewhere within the zone is the only method that’s obvious to me. Doing this exposes you to the risk of accidental deletion if you use the “Cleanup Tracks and Vias” tool (under the “Edit” menu in PCBNew). That tool lets you select, or suppress, the “Delete dangling tracks” task. If you simply end traces inside a fill zone as you suggest, I suspect you want to suppress this task and hope there are no other instances where a dangling trace really should be deleted.
This method works. Better if you extend the trace inside the zone (no risk of unconecting track and zone).
Even better if the track ends on a pad or via inside the zone. As the Gerber files are bi-dimensional, a track overlapped by a zone doesn’t add extra copper.
