How can I add hatch fill for a project?

beginners
1

I haven’t seen anything on the forum or elsewhere about adding hatch fill in Fritzing. Does this functionality not exist?

2

No, indeed there’s only a plain fill, no hatch fill. Can you tell us more about the advantages of a hatch fill, so we can judge the priority?

3

Thanks for the reply Andre. I’m designing a capacitive sensing board with two sliders and a proximity sensor. Everything I’ve read recommends about a 25% fill. I think it would work without it, but it seems like the hatch fills helps a lot with the readings. I’ve considered making a hatch fill in Inkscape, but that seems quite laborious. Any thoughts?

4

a workaround could be:

  • place all parts and wires
  • make a copper fill
  • export as image -> svg
  • open svg and delete everything, but not the copper fill
  • make your hatch fill structure
  • use the copper-fill to cutout all the part-connectors
  • load this file as a copper-logo
    -> do it as the last step, otherwise you have the logo-shape everywhere in your way :wink:

i don’t think there is another method for now. but a nice enhancement.

5

Thanks for the advice. It was a good bit of work, but I followed those steps and almost got it working. The only issue seems to be an import problem.

In Inkscape, I created one big object with all of the copper fill, then created the hatch, and used a clip to show the hatch only inside the object. Looks great in Inkscape, but when I bring it into Fritzing, the hatch is no longer clipped. It covers the whole image.

Any suggestions? Is there another type of file besides svg that Fritzing will read? Thanks again for the help.

6

After quite a bit of searching I got it working with the Eggbot Hatch Fill extension in Inkscape.