Hi, I'm fairly new to kicad. I've decided to try kicad because I'm not entirely happy with gEDA. So far kicad looks more polished, but I haven't done an in-depth comparison yet. My first impression was pretty good, although I wasn't too happy about eeschema crashing X (haven't tried to reproduce it yet, so don't have enough information for a proper bug report).
Anyway, I tried to do a simple two layer board layout with a solid ground plane on the bottom and a ground trace around the edges (both are zones). I want to stitch these zones together with a bunch of vias, but since there is no component connected to the zone on the top layer, pcbnew refuses to connect these two. Even when disabling DRC, it still won't do it (plus I don't really want to disable DRC for the whole board). The solution I've found is to add a bunch of 1 pin connectors to the schematic, connect them all to ground, and associate them with a module based on the 1PIN module (but smaller). This will allow pcbnew to connect them together. But I find it ugly to have to change my schematic based on the number of via's; these are purely layout elements that don't belong in the schematic. Another disadvantage is that a module will generate thermals, unless you disable them for the whole zone, but that's not a problem in this design. How do you handle these connections that only appear on the PCB and not in the schematic, and more specifically, stitching ground planes with vias? Regards, Alson
