Howdy all,
I'm creating a PCB design in Cadsoft EAGLE for eventual fabrication (probably via Sparkfun's BatchPCB service). Since this will be the first PCB I've ever had fabbed by a board house, I wanted to get the sage advice of the gurus here and avoid a potential issue.
The Sparkfun website's tutorial series has this admonishment under their Common Mistakes, Tips and Tricks section:
Don't run silkscreen across pads.
A search turns up this thread: Eagle Silkscreen vs Stop Mask...
Jim Wagner's advice to "smash" the part (in the PCB editor) sounded like just the trick I needed. Unfortunately, I found that when I smash the 10-pin header, only the 'name' text field ("ROT-SW") is movable. The "1" text and the "10" text remain locked to the part outline.
But I really don't care if the silkscreen that overlays the pads gets deleted by the fab house and is not printed. I just don't know how serious this case is and I wouldn't want the board to get rejected.
In fact, the MCU part, which came from the 'atmel.lbr' library, is designed with the chip outline (which I presume many people would include in the silkscreen layer) right over the top of all the pads!
So I suspect this would not be a problem if I just leave everything as shown in the image above. But it never hurts to ask. All advice and comments appreciated!
Regards,
Bill