Tag Connect component

Hi,

I try to create a tag connect parts for fritzing (3 holes and 6 round pcb pads).

All is fine except when I try to export this component to gerber file.
In the drilling view, my gerber viewer show me all my pcb pad as hole… impossible to know why…

If someone can help me and explain me what I’ve done the wrong way…

Thanks for the help.

Fabien

PS :

here the link to my part :
https://app.box.com/s/e591pphhr6fmszdj3n137zn02i2k2wqq

Fritzing sees all circle SVG elements as drill holes. If you convert them to paths it will no longer create drill holes.

See here for an example

While it isn’t clear to me what you are trying to do, the reason the pads are holes in pcb is that your pad stroke-width is 0 which creates a hole. The usual stroke width is 20 thou (although your scale is unusual so the conventional value won’t work here) and your fill needs to be none not #F7BD13 as it is now. If in Inkscape I change connector2pin to

style=fill:none;stroke:#f7bd13;stroke-width:1

in xml editor I get a proper pcb pad (which is much too large because the scale is wrong). I’d suggest exporting a 6 pin generic header and use the pcb svg from that to model your pcb svg file on. The scale should be correct and you can use a stroke-width of 20 to get an appropriate pad size. Hole size is pad diameter - 2*stroke width in Inkscape so for the headers with a .038 hole diamater is .078in - .040 (2 * stroke width) to give a .038 hole. Also your pin numbers should start at 0 for a properly configured part.

Peter

Thank you.

I was using Adobe Illustrator and converting circle to path completely break my pad size!
(in Illustrator all is showing well but in Fritzing, the pad are shown too big, the holes are ok)

I tried with inkscape and all is fine now.

As said to sublimeartistry, to use Inkscape in place of Illustrator resolved my issue.

I was trying to create a component from this datasheet :

For the connector start number, I started with 1 because Fritzing start with the number 1.
It’s maybe a bug. But if you place a barometric sensor scp100 on a breadboard, edit this component, go to “connectors”, set 1 to the number of connector, remove the last one manually and finally set 6 to the number of connectors… then Fritzing start to number with the number 1, not 0

I will do without removing manually the latest component and start numbering with 0.

Thanks for your reply.

It is certainly a quirk, I suspect it is because arrays in C start at 0. There are two numbers, external pin numbers start at 1, but inside a part they are supposed to start at 0. Illustrator should work fine (it sounds like your drawing size was set in px instead of inches or mm which can cause scaling problems). That seems to be an odd connector, if I’m reading it right it looks to want to not be soldered at all but press fit in to the board? In any case as long as its working for you.

Peter

You’re reading it right. It’s a cable used for programmation purpose without the need to have a connector to solder.

I have redesigned the component. Can you check it and say me if something looks wrong to you?

Here is the new link :
https://app.box.com/s/j1ij92sbgi38502a47xo84z0xgp9jp0d

PS : When I export the Gerber files, the connector pad are very pixelated. I’m using gerbv as renderer and even if I set the rendering on “high quality”, the pads look like in the minecraft game…

Any hint for me for this?

Thank you.

I can tell you why but not the solution (perhaps one of our more expert board people will know the answer). You circles are paths rather than a circle so they render poorly. I tried the simple solution of replacing them with cricles of 0 stroke width but that causes them to be drilled which isn’t what you want. I don’t know how you get a circular pad on an SMD board (because I rarely do boards). Hopefully someone else knows.

Peter

I didn’t give this answer the first time because it is more complicated but since you want round pads here it is.

  1. Decide final pad diameter (yours are 0.582mm).
  2. Draw a circle (any size).
  3. Turn on stroke and set the width to half the pad diameter (yours need 0.291mm).
  4. Turn off fill.
  5. Change the objects size to be the desired pad diameter (yours are 0.582mm).
  6. Add xml attribute drill and set to no.


This is how it looks in Fritzing.

This one just shows a comparison of the old and new pads with all the mask layers shown.

This is only the copper, drill and silkscreen layers and you can see it does not drill the copper pads.

Here is your part all fixed up. Import it into Fritzing and then do a restart of all open Fritzing windows. Now click on your current part and go into the inspector and you should see a variant called round pads that when selected should change the one in your sketch without any other work.
TC2030_Round.fzpz (8.2 KB)

Note: The reason you have to set the stroke width to half the diameter is because when you use drill=no attribute it seems to make rings not solid pads based on the radius being set and in previous attempts to use this feature I found this was the solution.

Great! Thank you for your help!