Electronic – custom circle copper fill in ares proteus

Copper pour has a couple of functions:

1. Create power & ground planes. These can improve the performance of PCB containing high speed signals. I'm guessing that high speed signals are not a part of your design. Anywhere you're not going to be able to do this without considerable re-layout of your design, probably moving most of the components on the underside onto the top side.

2. Improve etching. Firstly, having large pour areas (even if they are not connected to anything) reduces the amount of etchant that's used up in the etching process. This means you have to replace the etchant less often, and saves money.

3. Improve etching again. If you're etching the board yourself, you may notice that the board doesn't etch evenly across its surface. Large areas with no copper are using up the etchant more than areas with lots of copper. This makes the etchant weaker in those areas. By adding hatched copper fill across the board means the copper density varies less, and so it etches more evenly.

So my advice would be:

• If you're etching it yourself, then add copper pour connected to nothing.
• If your having it etched by a company, then leave the board without a pour.

EAGLE has no say over the outcome of the thickness of the actual copper layers themselves, since you'll be etching the board yourself and you're the one picking the copper board stock. However, you can increase the size of the annular ring to give yourself more room to drill a hole close to the center of a PTH.

Using the Info tool (the button that is the letter i), click on the PTH you are interested in and adjust the Diameter from auto to another value that is greater than your Drill size. Click Apply and visually inspect the hole - if it's still not as much copper as you want, increase the Diameter again until it's as thick as you want.

If you want to do this to all your PTHs, just use the Change tool, go to Diameter, and click the ... option at thebottom to set a custom value. This would ideally be the Diameter you chose when playing around with a single PTH. Then just start clicking on the other PTHs you want to update them.

This will only work, however, on PTHs you defined manually on the board layout. If some PTHs are part of the part's package, for example, you will have to edit their Diameter manually in the package itself, not in the board layout.