Unless you are building a really low budget board, you should have a non-routed ground plane which is well connected by non-thermal vias to the surface ground, poured or not. Four layer boards are pretty inexpensive today, and for many applications, the additional planes and the ability to have impedance controlled traces justifies the extra few dollars to get the boards built.
During design I route critical grounds directly even if I know they will be swallowed up by the pour at the end, you can say with certainty that the ground path is good. I think that etching your own boards is a dying art nowadays (sort of sad ?) and double sided boards are the same price so you can stick a full ground pour on the bottom and use 'Vias' but even then care must be taken.I loved your last example as that really is a "Trap for young players" and you had to be careful when just having one side of copper to play with and no DRC ! I enjoy any stuff others have to say on this subject and I hope you will do more sometime in the future as It's always a 'hot' subject...cheers.
One more detail: If You have several stages on one board it may be a good idea to create separate groundplanes. Otherwise it is so easy to get noise from the digital part right into the analog input stage for example. Or you can easy end up with positive feedback and oszillation if you have an loudspeaker power amp and a input stage sharing the same ground plane for example 🙂
I still don't understand ground in circuits, ive watched many videos. If I take a circuit diagram and try to build it, its very hard to understand where the grounds are supposed to go. They just end abruptly with the little symbol, how are you supposed to know where that connects to in reality?
Thank you so much for sharing this. I literally ordered boards the night before I saw this video they had the very problem that you talked about. I wish I had seen this before I ordered those boards. It's just on a decoupling capacitor that I have before a rotary encoder so I can jump over a wire from the ground on encoder to the ground on the capacitor and not have a problem but dang it I hate that I missed it. It's the first PCB I've ever created. Anyway love you videos thank you so much please keep doing this I have learned so much from you!
Thanks for the video. I just watched a video presentation from Altium Design featuring an engineer named Rick Hartley on the importance of grounding. You guys raise the same issues.
Given the modern possibility of chinese board manufacturing, where 2-layer and now even 4-layer boards are super cheap, (heck even western PCB prototyping isn't that bad if you don't mind) although a lot of the advice in here is valid, I am puzzled that you never gave the context of the availability of avoiding 75% of the problems presented here with a bottom-layer ground pour.
Unless you are building a really low budget board, you should have a non-routed ground plane which is well connected by non-thermal vias to the surface ground, poured or not. Four layer boards are pretty inexpensive today, and for many applications, the additional planes and the ability to have impedance controlled traces justifies the extra few dollars to get the boards built.
During design I route critical grounds directly even if I know they will be swallowed up by the pour at the end, you can say with certainty that the ground path is good. I think that etching your own boards is a dying art nowadays (sort of sad ?) and double sided boards are the same price so you can stick a full ground pour on the bottom and use 'Vias' but even then care must be taken.I loved your last example as that really is a "Trap for young players" and you had to be careful when just having one side of copper to play with and no DRC ! I enjoy any stuff others have to say on this subject and I hope you will do more sometime in the future as It's always a 'hot' subject...cheers.
One more detail: If You have several stages on one board it may be a good idea to create separate groundplanes. Otherwise it is so easy to get noise from the digital part right into the analog input stage for example. Or you can easy end up with positive feedback and oszillation if you have an loudspeaker power amp and a input stage sharing the same ground plane for example 🙂
I still don't understand ground in circuits, ive watched many videos. If I take a circuit diagram and try to build it, its very hard to understand where the grounds are supposed to go. They just end abruptly with the little symbol, how are you supposed to know where that connects to in reality?
I didn’t think about those thermal reliefs when I designed my lpf boards. Thanks for the info! …back to KiCad…
Thank you so much for sharing this. I literally ordered boards the night before I saw this video they had the very problem that you talked about. I wish I had seen this before I ordered those boards. It's just on a decoupling capacitor that I have before a rotary encoder so I can jump over a wire from the ground on encoder to the ground on the capacitor and not have a problem but dang it I hate that I missed it. It's the first PCB I've ever created. Anyway love you videos thank you so much please keep doing this I have learned so much from you!
Does KiCad warn about floating ground planes?
I really enjoy these PCB design videos! Thanks!
Are you gonna save these to a PCB play list?
5:54
Thank you @
Thanks for the video. I just watched a video presentation from Altium Design featuring an engineer named Rick Hartley on the importance of grounding. You guys raise the same issues.
Given the modern possibility of chinese board manufacturing, where 2-layer and now even 4-layer boards are super cheap, (heck even western PCB prototyping isn't that bad if you don't mind) although a lot of the advice in here is valid, I am puzzled that you never gave the context of the availability of avoiding 75% of the problems presented here with a bottom-layer ground pour.
but ground is ground! as long as it's connected to the chassis it's fine lol
@