Why are overlapping zones on same side with different priorities failing?

Layout
1

one one side of my board i would like to have a ground plane. easy enough, create a zone and connect it to the desired net. on that same side, if an area can’t get a connection to ground i would like it to fill with +5V. simple enough, create another zone to include the whole board, assign to the +5V net and give it a lower priority than the ground plane. However, it doesn’t work. the lower priority zone is not filling at all. i understood that the priority would allow one zone to fill all it can, then the next lower priority would fill all it could, and so on. is this not correct? seems the higher priority fills and excludes the filling of anyother zone within of lower priority.

thanks

craig

2

The priority does not work as you think it works. If two zones overlap and one has higher priority, then the high priority zone gets all the area its outline describes not just the one where it can fill.

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Thanks Rene. that is a shame. It really is useful to have the priority of fill zones apply to any particular sub area.

4

If there are only few such areas and they won’t be changed much you can add cutouts to the higher priority zone:

zone’s context menu -> Zones -> Add a Zone Cutout.

Then the lower priority zone can fill that space.

1 Like
5

Thanks. Good solution if there are a few.

Is there a way in kicad to list and display all zones? That is a very handy feature that I use often during the final layout and zone fill finalization

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There’s no list of zones. But what you mean by “display”? And why a list would be handy in board finalization?

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