the latest release seems to work differently. In the past, I would manually connect everything prior to the zone fill. In this latest release, Kicad makes the connections to components during the zone fill the rats disappear, and the drc is happy. The things it misses that I've found are:
1. where the edge of the zone crosses the pad of an SMT component; it gets connected (with thermal relief), but the rat remains, and drc says wrongly that it's unconnected 2. via stitching (e.g. top & bottom ground area stitching on high frequency boards) If you're manually making connections to thru-hole pads in addition to the thermal relief, then what I do is take the track out on top of the copper that the zone fill has put in (seems to be always on a diagonal for thru-hole, but horizontal/vertical for SMT). Nick. --- In kicad-users@yahoogroups.com, "bbt5001" <mo...@...> wrote: > > What is the Right Way to make connections to power and ground planes using > zones? > > In my first dabbling with a KiCad multi-layer board I assigned my middle > layers to power and ground. I manually routed connections to all the ground > pins and power pins (including vias to the surface mount devices) until the > rats nest count dropped to zero and the DRC was happy. I made the zones, > filled them, and all was well. > > Obviously, routing all the ground pins then filling in the zone is redundant, > so I thought I'd try without using explicit traces on the power and ground > planes. I removed my routing (thereby restoring those particular rats) and > had to put back a few vias to get ground and power connections to my > surface-mount parts. The DRC filled in the zones, the board passed the DRC > step, and the gerber files looked fine. > > So both ways appeared to work. > > In the first case, the traces I laid down were redundant, but I ended up with > a board with no remaining rats. I like that. The only oddity (and this is a > small nit I'm picking here) is that the connection to through-hole pads was a > combination of my trace and the thermals. > > In the second case the process is conceptually cleaner, but my board is still > left with a bunch of unresolved rat lines. I don't like that. > > Is there a preferred method for making zone connections that removes the rats > before the zones are actually filled? >
