i've had this problem recently too. i'm not sure what the difference was, but if i made the vias by starting a trace and immediately placing the via, they'd often show up with the correct net name (also ground in my case). when i saved and re-opened the file, however, the vias would no longer be connected to the net and would throw lots of errors in the DRC.
sorry i can't help more, hopefully someone else can give a better answer! - seth On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 1:20 PM, alm_flickr <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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 > >
