I have just designed my first board in Fritzing. When I am sending the exported gerber files to the Fab service, the copper around the holes of the DFPlayer Mini are missing. How to solve that?
DFPlayer Part
LOLIN32.fzz (176.7 KB)
While I see some potential problems, the mini player pads appear in the gerber output under gerbv and shouldn’t be an issue. The board doesn’t pass DRC (routing->Design Rules Check) that can be a problem with translates in parts. That said it is better to have DRC pass because sometimes the clutter is masking a real error a;though a quick visual check of the gerber output doesn’t show one. This is a capture of the gerbv output for your board:
As you see, here the miniplayer has pads and holes (its holes are a little small, around 0.036in where .1 square headers are normally 0.038in which may be a problem) but there. Also of note is the only 4 mounting holes that are being drilled are the 4 purple ones (that being drill layer) on the 4 corners. That means the rfid reader is only being supported by the header pins which may be a problem unless there is additional mechanical support off board. Also the SMD mosfet as noted (again circled in red here) is under the Lolin32 board on the top side. I would move the Mosfet towards the bottom edge of the board to give your self additional clearance and airflow from the Lolin board.
from this capture from pcb view, you look to have room to move the mosfet down towards the mounting hole (and maybe left to clear the mouting hole) to clear the lolin board. The red markers on the traces just above the mosfet are where DRC is complaining about lack of clearance. While you should be able to clear that by moving the traces, when I do so DRC complains about the edges of the header pads (which it shouldn’t.) That indicates to me the problem is likely translates in the player mini part that are affecting DRC and the only way to fix them is to fix the underlying part (which I’m currently too lazy to do, although as it is in core parts it will eventually get fixed for both hole size and translates.)
Peter
Thank you for sharing your expertise on my pcb design.
The RFID won’t be placed on the board itself, so I have replaced it with a 8-pinheader. So the drillholes are okay. I did the same with the dfplayer to fix the problem with the wrong sizes. I would even fix the part myself, but I don’t know what is exactly to do…
The LOLIN32 and the DFPlayer will be placed onto pinheaders.
I have moved the SMD part to the edge.
The DRC problems where only existent because I increased the configuration to have more space between the traces. Otherwise autoroute putted lines beween the dfplayer pins. I set it back to the “professional” settings and everything was fine.
That is to the good, the DRC errors looked ok, but a similar issue recently turned out to be masking a real error once I fixed up the offending part. Does the fab now accept the mini player pads? I don’t see why they should have been missing on the original because the proper pads appeared to be in the gerbers.
Peter
The dfplayer pads (that are just pinheaders now) work fine.