Working with filled planes

Filled planes are a convenient way to distribute ground or power connections to different parts of a PCB. A ground plane can also serve an important role in protecting your circuit from electromagnetic interference.

Placing a filled plane

Filled planes are placed in “Filled plane mode” simply by dragging out a rectangle starting from an empty location on the PCB.

Editing a filled plane

In “Filled plane mode,” you can move the corner points of a filled plane around by dragging with the mouse. You can insert corners along any edge simply by dragging the marker that automatically appears when you hover near an edge while holding “Shift”. You can remove a corner by pressing “Delete” when it is highlighted. If you hover the mouse over an edge without holding “Shift”, an edge marker rather than a corner marker appears. This is a convenient way to move the edge as a whole. A potentially nonintuitive (but very helpful) behavior is that perfectly horizontal edges can only be dragged in the vertical direction and vice versa, whereas edges that are not parallel to a principal axis can be dragged in any direction.

Deleting a filled plane

In “Filled plane mode,” you can delete a filled plane simply by pressing “Delete” while hovering over its interior. In “Edit mode” you can delete a filled plane by first selecting it and then pressing “Delete.”

Moving a filled plane

Move a filled plane in its entirety is done in “Edit mode” rather than in “Filled plane mode,” simply by selecting it and dragging it to a new location.

Making and breaking connections to a filled plane

In “Filled plane mode,” connections between pads and filled planes can be created and removed by double clicking on the pad. Likewise, connections can be made between plated holes and filled planes. Use the “Layer” buttons at the bottom of the “Properties bar” to choose whether a connection is made in the top or bottom copper layer. Note that plated holes can only connect to one filled plane. This is to prevent a mistake I have made too many times in other PCB layout programs, where I meant to move a filled plane connection from the bottom layer to the top layer but accidentally preserved the connection in the bottom layer as well. (Because these connections lie perfectly on top of one another, the bottom layer connection is easily overlooked.) If you absolutely must connect two filled planes using a single hole, you can create two separate holes first and drag them on top of each other. (But don’t tell anyone I said that.)

Moving a filled plane to another layer

This can be done in “Edit mode” just as for any objects. By careful: the layer association of filled plane–connected pads and holes does not automatically transfer.