After building a few boards, I've observed that manual soldering and rework of components connected to the ground plane is a real pain and takes special attention to avoid poor solder joints or components getting overheated.
I'm looking for a solution that allows me to use the ground fill functionality, since it makes routing so much cleaner, but allows me to decouple the pin/pad thermally for improved manual assembly/rework. Other CAD programs have 'thermal relief' or 'thermal break' or even copper fills that are a mesh fill instead of solid fill. Are there any similar features or settings in Fritzing? Any ideas on a workaround to achieve the result of thermal decoupling of the pad/pin from the large mass ground plane?
My initial idea was to surround my component with copper blocker, and instead of designating the component pins as ground fill seeds, route a regular sized trace a semi-short distance from within the blocker to the nearby ground fill. But i haven't figured out how to connect the trace to the ground fill. When the plane is on the opposite side of the board, a via seems to work when set to ground fill. Although, i'll need to test the effectiveness as a thermal break. Not sure how to make the connection when the plane is on the same side as the component.
Thanks
Chip