I want to add a ground plane to my PCB design, and the Circuit Design Guidelines29 recommends using a hatched plane, but I haven’t been able to figure out how change a Filled Zone (in KiCad 5.1.4) to provide a hatched plane, or any other method besides manually drawing my own with the Graphic Lines tool.
Has anyone had success (or any recommendations) for producing hatched planes with KiCad?
Dec '20
Jan '21
Hi @scottcun,
Did you end up finding a solution? We do not use KiCad internally so your guess is as good as mine.
If you found a solution, we can update the support article to include KiCad instructions.
Hey @jazozaya,
No answers yet, though digging into KiCad’s source repo20, it looks like the functionality may be available in their next major release (6.x).
Alternatively, after reviewing the Gerber File Format Spec3 I’ve been wondering how difficult it would be to convert an existing Gerber copper layer file to convert copper region statements into a series of interpolate statements converting the filled zones into copper traces of the region outline plus the hatched pattern.
The advantage to this approach is that you could take a standard Gerber output (like something you’d want to send to a PCB fab) and just apply the conversion to create a modified Gerber specifically for fabricating on the V-One.
However, I haven’t gone deeper to understand all of the challenges with this approach. I might take a stab at it sometime as a fun spike exercise. Is Voltera thinking about adding this support to the V-One software itself, or is it not on your backlog?
Hi @scottcun,
From the last few posts in this thread (Nov.2020) it appears hatch fill is in the latest nightly builds (Vn 5.99), so it might be an idea to grab yourself a copy from there!
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