Whats the best way of creating large ground planes

[grayb]

Whats the best way of creating large ground planes on the back face of a 2 sided board.

I just cannot find an easy way.

I am sure somebody can point me in the right direction please.

[greg_m]

You can draw oversized planes (outside the board’s outline). Also if you have a few of them from different nets - set the priority correct, so for example voltage rail will override GND plane (which in most cases is just the whole board).

You can also merge them - as long as they are the same net ans the same priority.

[tryitagain]

In the KiCad PCB Editor a ground plane would be implemented as a “zone”.

KiCad Docs - Working with zones

[paulvdh]

I usually draw the GND zone outside of the PCB outline too. it may be some shape like a big pentagon when the PCB is rectangular. I completely rely on the Edge.Cuts lines clipping the GND zone to the right size, and with such an unusal shape, it becomes obvious immediately when something went wrong and you’re inspecting gerber files.

[Naib]

@paulvdh

I usually draw the GND zone outside of the PCB outline too

This is the way

[paulvdh]

More like:

Which I posted in 2019 in the thread below: Seek review my first PCB design - #2 by paulvdh This way there is simply no ambiguity of whether the zone outline is defined by your zone boundary, or clipped by Edge.Cuts.

Back then zones could also only be selected by clicking on their edge, and the pentagon makes it easy to do so. I’m still disappointed of how easy it is to select zones these days. I select them far to often when I do not have any intention of selecting the zone. It results in a lot of messing with the selection filter, which was never needed when zones could only be selected by their edges.

[eelik]

How to create a power plane (using zones)

This article is about technical aspects of KiCad only, not about using GND or power planes in general. Working With Power Planes In short: KiCad uses zones for planes Zone is a copper area which can have an associated net and which can be filled automatically KiCad doesn’t normally fill isolated areas (and normally you shouldn’t even try that because it’s not electrically good) For a zone to be filled, a pad of the same net must be inside it or connected to it A via triggers filling, too, if…

[Piotr]

@grayb

I just cannot find an easy way.

When you have GND zone press ‘B’ to zone be correctly filled.

[Mineotopia]

I stopped doing like this, because this messes with KiKit when creating panels. Since then I started drawing the zones on top of the board outline similar to Naib