Is this the correct way of adding vias to connect two GND pours/planes?

Question

Following this advice, I created a GND pour/plane in F.Cu and B.Cu. Then added 4 vias with the default settings (I didn't touch anything). My intention is to connect the two GND pours/planes so that they are on the same potential.

Did I do it correctly?

Answer 1

The via itself looks fine to me, but note that you very likely are not paying per via, and that four are really not many vias. Since I guess you want the top ground plane as an RF reference plane at 2.4 GHz, maybe allow yourself a few vias more, otherwise this is more of a patch antenna than a ground plane; I'd go with "it's free, so do at least one via every 1 cm".

All in all, I'd say that this seems like a rather pointless second ground plane; what are you Really improving with it? These seem to pin header holes, so there's a large distance anyways, nothing to put on one side of your board: I'd frankly simply remove one ground plane, the one further away from your actual components, and if necessary move the connections to the other layer so that the ground plane stays uninterrupted, and probably remove ground below your sensitive external signal connector – if the last 5mm of that ground plane would do any good, you would need to do that along the whole cable, and if not, you'll just couple in noise running at the edge of your ground plane to your analog signals.

Other issues:

• I'm fairly certain there's going to be a chip antenna for 2.4 GHz on your ESP32 module. That will very very likely have a datasheet (else, uh… good luck?) that will define where you need a ground "keepout" below that antenna (you usually do). Can't have a ground there!
• Your connector J2 is too close to the screw hole for my taste.
• As you currently plan to do it might really be a good trade-off between design time and elegance, but I think I wouldn't buy some rather questionable HX711 module (the ones I've seen with your pinout are really badly designed) to then solder it to its pin headers to then solder it to another board? You can also directly throw the same HX711 IC alone on your board, add the necessary additional components yourself. See the "Reference PCB board schematic" in the official datasheet.