Hello,
I’ve noticed some trouble when I use arc segments in polygons. For example, I want to create a pad and package definition for the Wurth Redcube 7466005R connector. This part sits on an annular ring on an unplated through-hole with four semi-annular paste segments. (Probably the through hole is recommended to be unplated because of its size, which many manufacturers cannot guarantee a good plate).
The first problem:
To define the paste segments, I created polygons with arc-faced edges. These appear to show up just fine in Horizon. However, I notice that when I export to Gerber output, KiCad’s gerber viewer reports a bunch of errors during the import, with messages like this:
RS274X: Aperture Macro “PS11”: ill. symbol, line: "* "
Both KiCad and Seeed Studio Fusion’s gerber viewers render those arc segments as straight lines. This is what I see:
The second problem:
I tried making the part with both a plated through-hole and an unplated-through-hole package variant. For the plated-through-hole package, I wanted to define a ring-shaped solder mask layer in the padstack. I wasn’t sure how to draw a ring (as opposed to a solid circle), so I tried drawing two polygons that had half-ring shapes. For the unplated-through-hole, I did the same thing to create the copper ring around the hole.
That worked as expected in Horizon.
But the Gerber viewer fails to show anything for the ring, in either case. Solid circles show up, but not the rings. If the Gerber viewer is treating the arc segments as straight lines, as before, then I could see how that would cause this problem, as the resulting polygon would have zero area instead of a half-ring.
The third problem:
When I try to route a trace to the plated through-hole connector, that works fine. But when I try to route a trace to the unplated through-hole connector, I get a “critical core exception thrown in tool_begin of Route track: invalid pad polygons: 2”. That’s not good.
I wondered if maybe the problem was that it wanted to connect the airwire to the center of the nonplated through hole, which of course, doesn’t have any copper to connect to. So I tried adding some extra little circles inside the copper ring I already drew, hoping that the airwire would try to connect to one of those. But that didn’t change anything. (Except those circles show up in gerber viewer, even though the rings don’t).
Is there a way for me to attach files here that aren’t images? I can send you a minimal test case that reproduces this issue.
