I’m trying to correctly place a footprint on the back of the board (battery holder) to save space. I selected the b.cu layer on the right then added the footprint to front of the board, selected it and pressed F. This flipped it to the back of the board. When I open the properties for the FP all values on the right side in properties say it’s on the b.fab layer?
Can somebody explain?
I would have thought it should say b.cu.
Pressing f flips a footprint (or some selection) to either the back or the front of the PCB. It’s just the F and B that change, Silkscreen items will stay on Silkscreen, Fab items wil stay on the Fab layer etc.
I can not look over your shoulders from here, but my best guess is that you are misinterpreting what you are seeing in some way. Each footprint typically has items on all of the 5 layers that come in F/B pairs.
I have no KiCad here to check anything.
I have never added footprints to PCB (I always updated PCB to schematic).
Are you sure that when you selected b.cu and then added footprint it is added at front and not at b.cu?
May be such combination (selecting b.cu and then someway adding footprint at front) is so rarely used that there is some bug not noticed by anybody.
Do you mean the Left side Properties Panel?
OP are you under the impression that a footprint contains only Cu layers? It contains a whole bunch of layers, and a flip will cause the Fs and Bs to swap.
This is what i meant, see how in properties it says the layers are in b.fab, shouldn’t this say b.cu?
That looks like a non-KiCad footprint from the Internet. Those artefacts look like comment text that used to be on F.Fab. Since Fab objects are not manufactured, only commentary, it’s of no consequence.
The layer column is normally hidden for the text fields in the footprint properties. I just enabled that column by right clicking on the first row with labels and F.Fab is apparently the default layer for all text fields (but they are not set to visible).
No, Definitely not. In that case setting the visibility of text would create short circuits on the PCB. The Fab layer (meant for fabrication notes) is the most logical place for text fields when they are made visible.
