I am totally new to this!
I have worked the tutorial. I am making a simple board with three surface mount LED’s, one resister and pad to solder wires to. My problem is the pads. I want all the components on one side. I want the pads to be something like 6mm x 20mm on the front of the board and I want a duplicated set of pads on the back of the board with via’s to connect the two. I learned to create vias so I have those placed.
How would I add a set of pads on both sides of the board with vias connecting them?
A THT pad is pretty much the same as a via (Except that it has extra layers for solder mask, solder stencil etc but those can all be turned off) You can build up complex pads by combining several pads, and then set the pad number of all pads to the same number. For examples you can look in KiCad’s default libraries, any footprint that has the keyword “Thermal” in it uses this technique.
I did Not create Pad’s – Just placed SMD LED’s and Resistor’s
Copied and pasted then, set to Back Layer, Moved them and placed VIA’s.
You can size your Pads if you Double-Click them
Addition:
When you add via’s (or THT pads) in SMT pads, they suck up solder. This is a serious consideration when working with solder stencils, because the stencil aperture has a fixed size and thus a fixed amount of solder. (For hand soldering you just add more solder).
For special applications (such as this), sometimes the stencil aperture is made bigger then the pad to deposit more solder paste. During soldering the surface tension will pull the extra solder onto the pad.