Hello.
I see them from time to time on PCB's from who knows where, the technique of using two pads close together intended to be bridged with a small amount of solder can be a great solution to a few situations while creating prototype circuit boards or in finished designs in order too for example enable a choice of power supply voltage(say 3,3V or 5V) without using some mechanical contraption to switch signal paths.
But I have seen circuit boards that features these kinds if jumper pads but as opposed to the square ones that are easily created in Eagle CAD they are round, as if you would take a circular pad and cutting it in two and then separating the two half's some fractions of a millimetre, maybe as much a 1mm and they are great to work with. They are easy to bridge and easy to clear but I do not know how to create such a package in Eagle.
Do you know?
Or do you have any suggestion?
I spent a couple of hours today attempting to create such a device through using polygons, first a half circle on the Top layer as well as an identical sized polygon in the tCream layer and finally a polygon in the tStop layer that is larger than the two other polygons(I've deduced that this is what SMD pads are made out of, but it is more of an guess than deduction).
Then I use a small square real SMD pad which I put on the curved side of the half circle so that it overlaps the half circle in part, this is only because of as far as I know you must have ether a through-hole pad or SMD pad in a package to be able to tie it to a net.
Then I copy what I have made and turn it 180 degrees after which I tried to position it to create a pattern of a circle that has been cut in half and pushed apart to create a tiny strip without copper in between them.
But this creates a bunch of DRC errors, the following errors occur a few times each:
Clearance
Overlap
Width
But this is the best I can do, but I am not experineced with creating Gerber files as I thus far has etched all my boards at home.
Do you know of any way my goal could be accomplished?
You could say "well just use a square jumper..." and yes true but I really want to have a round jumper as long as it isn't straight up impossible to create.
Is there some way of using one pad and then cover some part of it with some layer in order to tell eagle to not allow copper to be left in that area?
Regards