What is the Right Way to make connections to power and ground planes using zones?
In my first dabbling with a KiCad multi-layer board I assigned my middle layers to power and ground. I manually routed connections to all the ground pins and power pins (including vias to the surface mount devices) until the rats nest count dropped to zero and the DRC was happy. I made the zones, filled them, and all was well. Obviously, routing all the ground pins then filling in the zone is redundant, so I thought I'd try without using explicit traces on the power and ground planes. I removed my routing (thereby restoring those particular rats) and had to put back a few vias to get ground and power connections to my surface-mount parts. The DRC filled in the zones, the board passed the DRC step, and the gerber files looked fine. So both ways appeared to work. In the first case, the traces I laid down were redundant, but I ended up with a board with no remaining rats. I like that. The only oddity (and this is a small nit I'm picking here) is that the connection to through-hole pads was a combination of my trace and the thermals. In the second case the process is conceptually cleaner, but my board is still left with a bunch of unresolved rat lines. I don't like that. Is there a preferred method for making zone connections that removes the rats before the zones are actually filled?
