Jim wrote:I am designing a couple of boards (if successful more than 2) that have the same "form factor". That is they are the same physical size and both (all) have fingers to plug into a card slot on a mother board. So I don't have to worry about registration of the fingers each time I come up with a new board, is there a way I can define a PCB template that includes the fingers? That seems like it would be hard to do since the fingers are a connector on the schematic and wouldn't line up right without some tricks. The other option might be if there were a command line to PCB that I could execute to tell it "put pin 1 of conn1 at X, Y". Or would it be best to have a template that has a target in silk to line the fingers up?I'm open to the simplest solution.
DJ Delorie wrote:
Create the PCB with the connector element pre-placed, using the grid and crosshairs to move it to the right position. Save that file. For each board you do, copy that file to the new *.pcb name and start editing...
Ethan Swint wrote:
Make a board with only the connector loaded, at the desired position. When you would like to lay out a new board, copy & rename the "template" file, renumber the connector, then run gschem2pcb. It will make an additional .pcb file that you can then "load layout data from file".-Ethan _
Vanessa Ezekowitz wrote:
Thank you Gentlemen and Lady! (See I didn't blow it this time) I'll give these suggestions a try and see what works best for me.Since this template is a plug-in card, it made me think of how hybrid integrated circuits are generally treated as single components in many situations. If your template is simple enough, maybe you could create a custom footprint out of it. PCB's buffer-assisted footprint creation method may be useful here, but depending on what all is in your template, it might be easier to just edit (a backup copy of) your layout file with a text editor, and manually turn it into a footprint file. Then you could just place a connector in your schematic file (Gschem I assume) and assign this new footprint to it. When you import it, the new board template would be brought into the empty layout along with the rest of your components, and you would treat it like one. This means you can't make major alterations to the form factor of the device, but you said you wanted to keep that fixed, so that's probably OK.
This list has to have the best support people I've been associated with. A big thanks to you all.
Jim. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user