I am learning about Fritzing using Simon Monk’s Fritzing for Inventors (McGraw-Hill Education 2016), and have come across a problem described in the book: “…the air wires for the ground connections are still there despite the connections having been made by the ground fill.” (p. 108)
Will this affect the PCB when I send it to Aisler for fabrication?
I am attaching the project file for reference.
many thanks in advance for your help,
Alvaro
monkLights.fzz (23.2 KB)
While I am far from an expert on ground fill, I think there is a problem. This is the gerber output of your sketch displayed in gerbv and it appears wrong. The red circled pads are not connected to the ground fill on either layer as far as I can see. If you aren’t running on Fritzing 0.9.10 already upgrading may help, but I think there are still some open bugs in ground fill even on 0.9.10.
edit: or not. I just tried deleting the ground fill and redoing it on a 1.0 prerelease copy and it does the same thing, so it is either misconfigured ground fill or the bug isn’t yet fixed (don’t know enough about ground fill to know which is the likely answer!)
Peter
Hi there Alvaro,
As @vanepp mentioned, your ground plane wasn’t correct: the pads connected to it (those linked with the black “air wires”) weren’t really attached.
After refilling it again (see attached image) now they are and they shouldn’t be a problem.
Best regards
PD: I’m using Fritzing v0.9.10
monkLights_refilled.fzz (23.4 KB)
Thank you @vanepp and @roboteach.
For this exercise, I have joined the pads without using the ground plane. Fritzing says it is OK, so after checking that the parts fit on to a printout of the board, I will send it to Aisler for fabrication.
All the best and thank you again,
Alvaro
You would be well advised to check the gerber output in a gerber viewer to verify it does what you want. No matter what Fritzing says, the gerber output is what the boards will be made from so checking they are correct is advised.
Peter
Thanks Peter. Will look for a Gerber viewer that works in Windows.
Alvaro
gerbv from the geda project is what I use on Windows, but there are lots of others.
Peter
