> On Jul 14, 2018, at 3:33 PM, Seth Hillbrand <s...@hillbrand.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Andy-
> 
> You don't provide enough information to help you here.  You'll need to show a 
> larger image of your board with other layers enabled and, ideally set with 
> some transparency so that we can see what's happening.
> 
> Connectivity _only_ applies to copper.  So the paste-only pads shouldn't have 
> any connections unless you also made them copper.  Did you follow Rene's 
> instructions on the user forum?

"Connectivity _only_ applies to copper.” Yes, that’s true, and that’s what 
baffled me. These pads were explicitly set to Layer Copper as None, only the 
F.Paste layer was checked.

I did follow Rene’s instructions, except for one point. I created one of the 
paste-mask-only pads, made sure it had no pad number and no net name, placed 
it, and then used the array feature to create the needed 3x3 array. His 
recommendation is to just duplicate pads. 

And that’s what broke it. It assigned pad numbers to all of the pads. The pad 
numbers assigned are like such:

+__+__+__+
|33|23|13|
+__+__+__+
|32|22|12|
+__+__+__+
|31|21|11|
+__+__+__+

and the pads inherited the net name associated with the pad number, since those 
pad numbers were already on the footprint.

When no copper layer is indicated in the pad, then the pad number vanishes from 
the display. After creating the array, I didn’t see any pad numbers, so I 
thought that all was well, and did not look at each of the pads to see that, 
yes, indeed, they _were_ assigned pad numbers, and as such inherited the pad’s 
net name.

I can see why the array function would create pad numbers for footprint pins 
which have a copper layer. It surprised me that it created them for these 
aperture pads, especially since the pad from which the array was created had no 
number. Rene does say that "Using the array function is not really possible in 
this case as it does not allow us to assign no pad number to the resulting 
pads,” but I didn’t appreciate what that actually meant.

The DRC wants the user to connect a trace to a non-existent copper part of a 
pad, and that’s not right.

Could the array function be modified such that if the original pad has no 
number, then it should not assign pad numbers to the cloned pads?

-a


> -S
> 
> Am Sa., 14. Juli 2018 um 14:00 Uhr schrieb <de...@latke.net>:
> I'm on yesterday's unified package of 5.0.0 rc3 on a mac.
> 
> Following my question about why the footprint editor wouldn't let me create 
> an arbitrary shape for a solder-paste-mask pad, which was not actually 
> answered but the workaround was actually what I wanted (and I figured out 
> what I was doing wrong, the pad shape has to be set to Custom), I went and 
> edited my footprint in place to add the paste-mask-only pads (no copper 
> layer). They're called aperture pads, I believe, and the footprint looks as 
> shown in QFN-paste.png.
> 
> Then I save it back to the layout, and I get a few connection errors, on a 
> board which was fully routed. The connection errors refer to traces which now 
> want to connect to those new aperture pads. I don't know why this should 
> happen, and I don't know how to fix it! It seems like the connectivity is 
> borked. I know about the change in the clearances (from 
> http://kicad-pcb.org/blog/2018/05/Mask-Clearance-Generation-Changes/) but 
> that doesn't seem to apply here, as it's a connectivity issue. This is shown 
> in QFN-DRC-fail.png.
> 
> I'm willing to believe that I did something wrong, but what!
> 
> Thanks ... 
> 
> 


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