Electronics > Altium Designer

Adding "designator" to top layer drawn with "fill" command in altium

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electronx:
I'm pretty new to altium. I'm trying to draw a USB micro footprint, I usually use footprintwizard, but I wanted to draw from scratch.
I used the fill command and then added the paste mask extension and solder mask extension. However, I saw that I cannot assign a designator to this pad. Is there a way to add a desginator to this or is this a feature added to unconnected pads for stability? otherwise I will have to continue with add pad.

ajb:
Why use a fill for this instead of a pad?

Sometimes you might need to use a copper region to create a pad that isn't one of the available pad shapes, in that case you would add a small pad somewhere within the region and assign the designator to that pad to create electrical connectivity to the region.  But that shouldn't be necessary for a simple rectangle pad.

For mechanical pads, I would typically assign them all the designator "M" so that one pin in the schematic symbol can create connections to however many pads the footprint needs, this makes it easy to use the same sch symbol for different parts with different numbers of mechanical pads.

thm_w:
You can watch some tutorials, or open existing footprints to get an idea how they were made

electronx:

--- Quote from: ajb on June 29, 2022, 06:19:49 pm ---Why use a fill for this instead of a pad?

Sometimes you might need to use a copper region to create a pad that isn't one of the available pad shapes, in that case you would add a small pad somewhere within the region and assign the designator to that pad to create electrical connectivity to the region.  But that shouldn't be necessary for a simple rectangle pad.

For mechanical pads, I would typically assign them all the designator "M" so that one pin in the schematic symbol can create connections to however many pads the footprint needs, this makes it easy to use the same sch symbol for different parts with different numbers of mechanical pads.

--- End quote ---

"in that case you would add a small pad somewhere within the region and assign the designator to that pad to create electrical connectivity to the region."
thats the answer what i need.
some resources

https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/working-with-custom-pad-shapes
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/309364/altium-footprint-using-lines-arcs-and-shapes
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/195412/altium-issue-pcb-switch-pad-nets-for-rubber-button

electronx:
Alitum now supports custom pad design
draw a closed area with lines, then convert to custom shape pad.

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