ErrType(): Via near trackĪw shucks! What's wrong with my board? The vias marked with red arrows are too close to the traces near by. Press enter again to run the DRC with the default settings. Save yourself the layout time and rely on the PCB fab house to correctly fabricate your board. If you've got a complex board with tight layout challenges, it's better use the smaller trace/space and vias. That stated, we are seeing many PCB fab houses charge low prices for 7mil trace/space and 12mil vias. There's nothing worse than troubleshooting a faulty product and asking yourself: "I've tried every rework and soldering trick in the book, is it the PCB that's bad?" We design with 10mil trace/space in order to insure and reduce the probability that we'll see PCBs with errors on the production floor.
And those errors can be hard to identify. Making PCBs is tricky and for each increment of tolerance you remove you increase the chances that the PCB (proto or not) will be fabricated with an error. Why design in 10mil trace/space when a fab house allows 8mil or smaller for the same price? You shouldn't need to go that small on your first board. We go smaller than this on many designs but if you're designing your first PCB, do not design it with 4mil traces and 8mil vias. In general, SparkFun designs boards with: Let's take a moment to talk trace width, trace spacing, and vias. Re-open the DRC window and you can now change the settings using imperial units. This will change all the units to inches.
On the left tool menu of the PCB layout window, click on the 'in' button. If you'd prefer to see the settings in inches, close this window. Note: All the DRC settings are in millimeters.