Non round hole

[old gregg]

I have a project which needs to fix the potentiometer trough the board. I use GerbLook to visual the board with gerber files. But the needed holes aren't represented correctly (cf. picture). OshPark webesite gave me the same output.

Is it a Kicad problem or a Gerblook ? How can I manage this ?

[doobedoobedo]

I found this a few days ago

As drawn, it won't turn out quite right. Kicad indicates slots with a G85 "Keep Drill Down" command in the drill file, which our tools don't currently support. Instead, it's interpreted as a single drill hit.
The way we need it is as shown in our Cutouts and Slots page. The best way to do this in Kicad is to draw the slot boundary on the Edge Cuts layer using the Graphic Line tool. Everything else will already be handled by the slot you've already drawn.

If you're having trouble, feel free to send over your gerber  files, and I can do a quick pass through to convert them to a style we support.

What I actually did was add a line drawn for the slot on the edge cuts layer the same thickness as the diameter of the slot.

That looks great! If you order that it should have the slots on the final board.

Out of curiosity, does Kicad complain about the extra layer? And further, did it complain about the extra slot? I was under the impression that Kicad had issues with "open contours" on the Edge Cuts layer, hence my initial suggestion of a bounding box. Given the option, drawing the line as you have is much simpler for both the customer and our fab.

I get an error when opening the 3D view, although it still seems to render it fine so:

Thanks for running that test for me there. I'll poke at a few things and try to improve our documentation a bit for that. I think I found a way to con Kicad into allowing "lines" on the edge_cuts layer, but have to do some testing.

[old gregg]

thank you.

It appears to be a known issue. I'll investigate that, I was about to order PCB. Good things I verified it.

A substitute could be to make them plain hole I guess, but I've doubs about the proper holding of the potentiometers.

[doobedoobedo]

Mine was a vertical USB port. I wasn't keen on making big holes either.

[old gregg]

I created new footprint with round hole. Might be easier to make manufactered, although I try the slot method. The potentiometer and jacks will be tied to the front panel with nuts so I guess it won't be problematic.

For a USB connector, the story is different I guess.

[doobedoobedo]

The boards came back with nice plated slots

[bson]

I've made boards with oblong holes straight up from KiCAD to dirtypcbs, and they came back perfect.  Not sure if they had to manually intervene though and translate the drillout to a millout, but regardless they're as expected even though their online preview just shows a simple drill hole.  This is for a TE USB micro board connector, two layer board.

[old gregg]

I've made round holes and send the pcb to the chinese fab, it isn't really an issue to have round holes in this case. I really needed to get something going. But as I'm not really satisfied, I'll probably change the layout (again).

By the way, it has nothing to do with the subject but it's commun pratice to use the back layer as a ground plane along with the top one ? both being connected with vias ? I've seen some PCBs using that method.

[old gregg]

I finally built the boards. And everything worked out good. It is either a miracle or the result of a detailed care. For a first pcb I'm quite happy with the result. Although the acrylic panel isn't the cutest one...