Extra lines and circles added to pads

[adrewery]

High-level goal
I’m trying to print a circuit with 0.5mm pitch QFN pads. Everything was going swimmingly until I got extra circles and lines printed through some of those pads.

Steps taken
First I drilled my holes and got set up to print the ink. The QFN pads were looking pretty good, but then suddenly it drew a giant circle in the center of a bunch of pads. When I looked into it a bit, I realized that the Voltera application was adding extra lines and circles.

When you look at the raw Gerber files, they are not present. The Gerber files are exported and viewed from KiCAD.

I thought it may be due to overlapping lines from the trace going into the pads. However, the result did not change after routing the traces just to the edge of the pads.

Have you contacted Voltera Support, what did they say?
Contacted Voltera support, but they are offline until tomorrow. I will update post as I find out more.

I have attached the Gerber files to this post as well.
brain_rubicon-F_Cu.zip (23.6 KB)

[adrewery]

This appears to be related to a setting in the Gerber export process. Be sure to have the “Use extended X2 format” option unchecked and this will not happen.

[jazozaya]

Hi @adrewery,

Glad you figured it out. Thanks for sharing the solution!

Regards,

[DavidS]

Just for future use in case anybody has this problem in Solidworks PCB…

I was having the same problem when I exported files from Solidworks PCB, with extra circles of ink added to the drilled holes. This caused the ink to smear when the nozzle moved away, and I had to manually scrape off the excess with a craft knife after curing.

The fix for this in Solidworks PCB is to change the settings in the NC Drill Files configuration. In those settings, make sure to select “Keep leading and trailing zeros” as per the image below.

This may be an obvious mistake, but originally I had it set to “Suppress trailing zeros”, and that caused some drill holes to be filled with ink.