I've just finished the first pass of layout on a board in Eagle, and I turned on all the board layers and ran a design rule check. I got a considerable number of errors, because a number of my parts that I'm using from Eagle's builtin libraries have tiny >VALUE labels right in their centers, under the stop mask. This yields stop mask DRC errors for every vector in the label. In the image below, I've used a stock TPPAD1-13 from the Eagle library testpad.
The offending value label can be seen in the very center of that test pad. I've found that I can smash the package, then set the value label's display attribute to off, which makes it disappear, but I'm not positive this is the best way, nor do I want to do this for every part – there are over 900 similar errors.
So, two questions:
- Why were these packages designed this way?
- What is the best way to fix the errors caused by these labels?
Best Answer
I can't say for sure why you have the very tiny label on that particular part. Perhaps the idea was to make it "disappear" without deleting it altogether. This allows it to still appear on a BOM, for example.
In general, the value field is not normally used in the silkscreen at all, except maybe in certain educational projects or kits.
Normally, the value field is used only in an assembly drawing, where it just needs to be small enough to match the general size of the part on the drawing.
As I said above, simply don't include the value field in your silkscreen layer. This is why "names" and "values" have their own layers in the design stack.
Otherwise, it would probably be worth your while to create a custom library that has the labels the way you want them.