Making a small +5V copper-fill area

advanced
1

I wanted to build a roughly triangular area copper-filled, tied to net +5V.
Here is a portion of the schematic:

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I wanted to tie the +5 on U2 (Vout), C17, and C18 on the YELLOW side together with a fairly large pad, and connect this to the RGB LEDs with a +5V bus on the ORANGE side of the board.

I accomplished this with 6 vias. Here is the PCB view, from the TOP:

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First I added the 5 intermediate Vias. Then I connected U2, C17 and C18 (all on the YELLOW side) with 48mil traces to 3 Vias. And interconnected those also to two other Vias.

Then I drew this triangular fill area, by connecting the 6 Vias to each other with 100mill traces.
The result is pretty good! This might be overkill, however, since all the failures in my previous board layout were power and voltage-drop related, a little overkill is good.

Next, I will ground-fill the top (YELLOW) side; and copper-fill the rest of the bottom (ORANGE) side.

-allan schwartz

2

Fritzing doesn’t really have a mechanism to create irregular shaped copper areas other than ground fill. There are ways of working around this to create such an area. Here is a tutorial on making a capacitive touch pad which is a solder mask covered copper area like you are looking for. How to Make Capacitive Touchpads in Fritzing

You could also use the Logo part in the core parts bin to import an SVG of the shape you want and then use that as your copper area.

3

I’m pretty happy with the triangular area I have created. This technique can be extended to make any polygon shaped object, however, a large number of extra Vias may be required. In my case, I want the Vias anyways, because they acting as thermal Vias – since the voltage regulator may be a source of heat.