After too long, I’ve updated to V8. While I’ve figured most of the changes out, I’m still battling not being able to place tracks because of a DRC error. I’ve checked the board setup constraints, but can’t find anything that might explain what the error is.
Here is a picture taken with my cell phone (because I could not move the cursor to get a screen shot on Windows 11). This shows what pops up when I tried to drage a via.
Hopefully someone can point me to where to look. As a side comment, this is reminiscent of when a compiler just give you a “syntax error” instead of telling you what it was unhappy about. Imagine if there was a way to both point to the specific rule that was violated, and then gave you the “path” to get to the right place to fix it. I’ve written assemblers and web page before, and I realize that you can easily double the size of any code that deals with people, but it sure is a win.
My grid was set to 1 mil (.001") so each grid line here is 5 mils.
You can first do a [Ctrl + Click] to force KiCad to commit, and then select two of the itemsa and do PCB Editor / Inspect / Clearance Resolution to get a report of where KiCad thinks the error is. Or just do DRC and click on the DRC violation errors.
I used the CTL+click to get things done. What I was trying to figure out is which design rule was the causing the problem.
I see the the minimum clearance has a zero value, presumable that triggers some default, same on minimum connection width.
The other “challenge” I’m grappling with is the much tighter clearances of OSHpark vs. the PCBway and jlcpcb design rules. I’ve done about 60 boards of various sizes (probably about 15 that were good sized vs. connectors, footprint tests, etc) and it’s looking like I’m spoiled a bit… I saw one forum post that said to just use the KiCad defaults and those groups would be OK with it, but the defaults were smaller than those companies. While I have been assembling my own board (stencil and reflow), I am trying to figure out if using a “do it all” group is a win or not. Am leaning toward not since their setups are too big.
This is also why I’m focusing in on exactly what each setup parameter is.
next step is to go through the KiCad manual and hope for clarity. I was also hoping the post might be something that could make it’s way into KiCad. Saying which rule was violated would really help.
