Behavior of multiple copper pours on one layer

[Sebastian]

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

i'm currently working on a PCB layout in DipTrace 5, where i need to have two different copper pours connected to two different nets on the same layer. Both copper pours should fill their respective side of the board and "respect" the board outline, as well as board cutouts. I just can't figure out, how to achieve this. I have made a simple example to show my issue. I will try to attach it to this post. Screenshots follow:

screenshot-1.jpg (94.25 KiB) Viewed 9866 times

As you can see, the pours are propperly connected to their nets, but they do not follow the board outline. They only follow the board cutous.

screenshot-2.jpg (33.41 KiB) Viewed 9866 times

As soon as i enable the option "Depending on Board" for one of the pours, it will fill the whole board, completely ignoring the other pour. When i set different pour priorities for the copper pours, the higher priority one will completely overwrite the other one, again leaving me with one copper pour, filling the whole pcb.

screenshot-3.jpg (68.62 KiB) Viewed 9866 times

Does anyone have an idea on how to solve this? Am i just doing it wrong? What am i missing?

I appreciate any help!

Regards,
Sebastian

[Tomg]

As far as I can tell, it looks like you will have to manually edit the pours. If so, here's one way to do it in the example you provided...

1) Left pour: Pour Priority = 1, enable [x]Depending on Board, click on OK, ignore the short circuit warning by clicking on OK one more time.
2) Unpour all pours, right-click on the left pour's outline, choose Properties, click on the [Border] tab and delete all of the points on the right side of the pour except for the two points with the smallest X-values. The X-values of those two remaining points should be identical.
3) Move those two remaining points horizontally to the left (change their X-values) so they end up at the desired location near the middle of the board, then click on OK.
4) Right pour: Pour Priority = 2, enable [x]Depending on Board, click on OK.
5) Repour all pours.

[Sebastian]

As far as I can tell, it looks like you will have to manually edit the pours. If so, here's one way to do it in the example you provided...

1) Left pour: Pour Priority = 1, enable [x]Depending on Board, click on OK, ignore the short circuit warning by clicking on OK one more time.
2) Unpour all pours, right-click on the left pour's outline, choose Properties, click on the [Border] tab and delete all of the points on the right side of the pour except for the two points with the smallest X-values. The X-values of those two remaining points should be identical.
3) Move those two remaining points horizontally to the left (change their X-values) so they end up at the desired location near the middle of the board, then click on OK.
4) Right pour: Pour Priority = 2, enable [x]Depending on Board, click on OK.
5) Repour all pours.

Hi Tom,

thanks for your very detailed explanation. For now this should solve my problem, but it definitely feels more like a workaround, than a real solution. I'm wondering if the implementation of copper pours in Diptrace is not ideal, or if im just asking for something, that copper pours are not meant to do...? I'm not a professional PCB designer, so maybe i'm just using it wrong

Best,
Seb

[Tomg]

Glad to be able to help. Unfortunately, there is no way for DipTrace to know where one pour needs to end and the other needs to start; it must be defined manually. However, I'm not too keen on DipTrace automatically shorting the two nets together; even with the warning. Perhaps that was the safest solution they could think of for this situation. There are some improvements to the copper pour tool that I hope to see some day (here is a link to a previous post outlining a few of them - viewtopic.php?p=28701), but I suspect they have more important things to concentrate on at the moment.