Problem with PCB created with Fritzing

Hi all, I’ve used Seeed several times to order PCBs that I created in Fritzing. This time I either have a defect in production or hit a bug in Fritzing. I’m not sure which. I am asking here because, although production service through Seeed is very good, their customer service can be poor and I’d like a second opinion.

If you glance at the image here http://imgur.com/a/c8Ftv you’ll see some trace lines that are not connected to the through hole plating. I’ve circled these issues in red. The connections look fine in Fritzing and there are no errors in the design check, and I always run the check at least 10 times before I send the files off for production.

So what’s the opinion here? Was this a manufacturing error or my error? If you need more information evaluate this, I am happy to provide it. Thanks!

You would be best to upload the Fritzing sketch the pcb was made from and then one of us could have a look to see what (if anything) is wrong. You could (and should before sending boards for production) use a gerber viewer such as gerbv to check the gerbers that Fritzing created for problems like this.

Peter

Thanks, would you also need the third party parts I’m using?

I did load the project into a Gerber viewer and the issue does exist there.

Nope, they will be automatically included in the sketch.

It appears the problem is in Fritzing then (either a mistake or a bug)

Peter

Ok, the file can be found here. If you or somebody else is able to take a look I’d really appreciate that.

The first thing I see is that on Fritzing 0.93b on Win with the latest parts updates, is that there are 3 outdated parts that it wants to update. Letting it update them (it actually updated 13 not 3 as well) doesn’t fix the problem and may have broken other things. So I then exported the node cpu part and made a test sketch with it and a 2 pin connector and that tells me the part is broken because the gerber shows the same thing (a trace connected in Fritzing doesn’t connect to the pad in the gerber). That is actually good news because I can probably fix up the part for you. Thats good news because it indicates you may not have database corruption (which would require scrapping the entire sketch and starting again which unfortunatly may still happen). I’ll have a poke at the part and see what happens.

Peter

Wow, awesome, thank you so much!

Do you have the outside dimensions of the node cpu board? There is something odd about the current pcb layout in terms of scaling and the numbers aren’t coming up correct in Inkscape. The pads are easy because they are on .1 boundaries but the silkscreen outline I’m having to guess at.

Peter

OK here is a corrected part (I substituted the pcb svg from another node cpu part I have). For some reason the pads on one entire side of your part are wrong (probably insufficient stroke width) and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it so I substituted a different one. You unfortunatly have to delete the original and then redo the layout but when I did that this one appears correct in the gerbers.

Peter

NodeMCU V1.0_fixed.fzpz (13.4 KB)

Thanks, Fritzing is an open source CAD software for the design of electronics hardware that support designers to building permanent circuit.

Hi vanepp sorry for the delay, this is amazing, thank you! Seems like you don’t need the outer dimensions of the Node MCU at this point?

Nope I more or less copied the ones that the original part had. They may not be quite accurate but should be close enough.

Peter

I am creating a new part, bread board working, connections set, schematic ok, but when I try to load image for PCB, I load it, no error, but the graphic on screen is blank, I never get image. So I created my part by customizing a copy of a similar part, again was able to update bread board, schematic, and connections, but when I try to replace the PCB graphic, the load seems to fail, and I am told there is missing copper, but that is of course correct, because I have yet to map the PCB graphic! Because I can’t get the new PCB graphic loaded! Help!

So this is the PCB svg for a part.

It’s hard to work out what going on without the svg, can you upload. Use the 7th button above for the part(better), or for the svg change the extension to .fzpz and we will change it back to view it.