solarmon
commented
3 years ago I had ordered different coloured boards from JLPCB. It seems they may be using different manufacturing process for the different coloured boards. Or they had manually adjusted clearances when making the red and blue boards.
My green boards all have this manufacturing issue with the copper pour randomly being exposed, But the red and blue ones seems to have had the clearances adjusted.
Hi
I've been having quite a few failures building these RGBtoHDMI v2 boards. One of the issues I'm finding is that the solder mask clearance does not have enough tolerance and there could be manufacturing variances, and bad soldering techniques, that could lead to exposed copper and shorts occurring.
The issues seems to be that the copper pour clearance is set the same as the solder mask clearance - both at 0.2:
In the 3D viewer you can see that there is potential for copper to be exposed, depending on the manufacturing process tolerances.
So you could end up getting solder shorting on to the copper pour - here are a few of my examples of pins shorting to the +5V copper pour:
To get around this issue, I would normally set the copper clearance value to something slightly bigger - like 0.254 - so that the solder mask will always be covering the copper pour edges.