When laying a copper ground plane in easyeda I keep getting these big patches without copper on them. Does anyone know if there’s a reason for this, or if it would cause issues such as radio interference? I’ve tried getting rid of it by laying out another plane in these spots but it doesn’t go away.
The spots are because there is no path for ground to reach those areas (ie, the path into there is blocked by traces or traces and pads being too close together to satisfy your Clearance setting. You can move your traces and such a bit further apart to allow your fills into those spots, set your Clearance lower (assuming your fabhouse will support a lower clearance), or be satisfied with it the way it is.
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ahh okay, thanks! If that’s all it is then it should be an easy fix.
A ground plane may provide some shielding, but the components are still largely exposed to the atmosphere anyway (they are not in a Faraday case), and you will be using patch cables that are not shielded anyway, so I would not worry too much about radio interference because of a small gap in the ground plane. If you really want to get rid of them you can insert a thru hole element or draw a copper patch there by hand labeled GND and connect that via a wire to the GND elsewhere on the PCB.
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I hadn’t considered all the other factors that could introduce interference. Luckily moving a couple components around fixed and setting another GND plane fixed the problem, but I’ll take those other methods into consideration in the future. Maybe it’s just me but I always assume every little thing has to be perfect or the circuit won’t work.
On a semi related note, how would you go about determining how much to isolate eyelets from the ground plane? This is the default
but I see Sam gives them a good deal of space
So far I’ve been using defaults and have not gotten in any problems with them. But this probably boils down to soldering skills.
You also can use a ground fill on both sides of the PCB (assuming you’re making a 2 layer PCB), and often an eyelet that can’t connect to ground on one side can on the other; you can then add a via if desired to fill that area on both sides. As others have said it’s probably no big deal, but I don’t know of any significant downside to doing it.
I think Sam’s annular rings (the difference between total pad size and drill hole size) is about the thinnest I would make things. I like them thicker because they’re less likely to peel off and they’re easier to solder.
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Totally agree about the annular ring thickness. I meant the gap between the edge of the solder mask and the gnd plane
I mean, i don’t tend to draw a soldermask keepout for each and every pad. In general the copper part of the pad just gets copied into F.Mask and B.Mask, so if the’s not copper it’s soldermask. As far as the distance between the pad and the fill zone, that’s just clearance again.
Also I wouldn’t really worry so much about EMI for this stuff. We’re making a beep and boop machine, not a microwave ham radio or high-speed memory. People made this stuff a long time ago with traces hand drawn onto fr4, etched in a brownie tray, and with no soldermask at all.
oh I forgot to mention, but this IS for a ham radio/beep boop machine 
No but you have a point. Thanks for putting it into perspective.