It seems to have done a beautiful job. The ground fill bridges at each pad work better if there is not an existing trace to ground. However, all of the dashed lines indicating unrouted nets remain, and it still reports “19 connections still be routed”. However, a visual check of the ground plane reveals all ground pads are connected to the ground plane.
You should always route all your ground traces even when using ground fill. It will just cover all the traces with ground fill as if they are not there. By routing them you can be sure that all the parts you want grounded are actually grounded since Fritzing doesn’t actually care if ground fill is complete and acting as a trace. It simply fills in all the empty space with copper and connects to any net that has at least one ground seed. Also once you have the ground traces connected you only need to set the ground fill seed on a single connection that is part of the ground net you have created with traces.
Can I ask a supplementary question to this? I use copper isolation routing to fab boards so inevitably there is a lot of copper left and it makes sense to use this for the ground connection. One of the benefits of that is that it removes all the ground traces which makes routing a lot easier. Obviously one does need to do a manual check to make sure that all the gnds are connected where needed.
However even when doing the routing the dashed rats-net ground lines are confusing and make manual routing harder. You can’t actually delete them because that actually removes the conenction. What would be really useful is a way to hide all the dotted lines associated with a net. Is there a way to do that please?
I don’t think so. You can suppress all rats nest lines by unticking the tab for rats nests in Views but that suppresses all the rats nest lines. You should be able to rout the ground rats nest lines as traces which will remove the rats nest lines though.
Yes, but the problem is that if you make a ground rats nest line which is crossing a non-ground line then the router cuts both lines so they are disconnected! With isolation routing you get a large area of copper fill for free which can do all the ground connections.
