Vias connected layers issue
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Vasyl Skral
Currently, vias in Flux behave to remove Non-Functional Pad
But it causes more problems with layout design, and solves nothing
Brooks Solveig
Vasyl, help me out. I’m trying to understand this bug. A more structured report would’ve helped greatly, but after watching your loom, I think I can put it together.
So it looks like there are two things happening here.
First, there seems to be a bug related to the connected layers rule on smart vias. For some reason, some smart vias are only showing one layer in the rule, despite obviously having traces going to them on multiple layers. You didn’t seem to know why that was happening and neither do I. So this is the scary bug we should dig into.
Second, there seems to be a feature request here to render annular rings on all layers for through hole vias regardless of the value in the connected layers rule. Did I get that right? The team actually discussed that this week and I believe we’ve agreed to do that. I’ll need to confirm.
I think that’s everything, right?
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Vasyl Skral
Brooks Solveig Sometimes, when you edit traces that are connected to via, you move them or delete them and then draw them again because the previous traces locations weren't optimal. And you can't identify if the via is still connected to both layers or not.
So smart via are not so smart after all. I assume that actual smart via should set connected layers to each layer where copper of the same net is present (trace, fill, polygon).
Annular rings on layers that are not connected to trace, fill or polygon are called Non-Functional Pad. And deleting those non-functional pads is for advanced design only; there is no reason to delete them by default. Problems that I have with this project can be solved if I had an option to keep non-functional pads (dumb vias).
Dumb vias - default
Smart vias - option
Also, it scares some users; ask Nico about it
Here is a good article about the pros and cons of non-functional pads removal
https://www.pcbway.com/blog/PCB_Basic_Information/Do_you_need_non_functional_pads_PCB_Knowledge_3f75e8c8.html