PADS question: document name
John Larkin
Hi,
Our long-time PADS guy left to start a new life, and we're breaking in
a replacement.
It's going well, except for this annoyance: we used an old board as
the basis for a new one, with a big ECO, saving the outline, mounting
holes, and most of the power supply stuff. Works fine, renamed and
saved as a new design. But the fab and assembly drawings still show
the old design name at the lower-left, and we can't find the menu item
that might allow us to change this. The PADS docs and HELP are of
course no help.
We're running Logic and PCB version 5.0.
This isn't a problem in schematic printouts, since there the design
name comes out as a pleasing string of heiroglyphics.
Help appreciated.
John
Eeyore
John Larkin wrote:
Maybe it needs to be started as a new 'project'. Orcad was a bit like
that. Not a PADS expert though so don't take my word for it..
Graham
a7yvm1...@netzero.com
I'm not a PADS guy, but Allegro.
Is it possible it has been "collapsed" and is no longer text? It might
be a bunch of lines.
I do that with drawings just so it's hard to change the titles and
such.
Paul E. Schoen
"John Larkin" <jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:s2rcm45rdcha18hct...@4ax.com...
This would be a good question to post on the PADS forum, but I think you
can change the name of the design when you "Run" the "Print/Plot" menu, and
there is a little text box for job name.
Otherwise, you can just export the design to an ASCII file and find the
offending text, change it, and ASCII import back in.
I have PADS2004sp2. I think it worked the same with its predecessor, 5.x.
If you had a newer version this might not work. Every time they fixed one
bug, they introduced a few more "features" and a whole sackful of new bugs.
Paul
John Larkin
Thanks: it turns out that you have to save the project and re-open
it... it's that simple. Our new pcb person had kept the job open for
days, without a save-as!
We dropped PADS support at V5. Pads 5 is essentially perfect, so all
Mentor could do is break it. When they started offering courses to
help experienced Logic users to use the new rev of Logic, we figured
it was time to bail.
John
boB
<pst...@smart.net> wrote:
>
>"John Larkin" <jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
>news:s2rcm45rdcha18hct...@4ax.com...
>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Our long-time PADS guy left to start a new life, and we're breaking in
>> a replacement.
>>
>> It's going well, except for this annoyance: we used an old board as
>> the basis for a new one, with a big ECO, saving the outline, mounting
>> holes, and most of the power supply stuff. Works fine, renamed and
>> saved as a new design. But the fab and assembly drawings still show
>> the old design name at the lower-left, and we can't find the menu item
>> that might allow us to change this. The PADS docs and HELP are of
>> course no help.
>>
>> We're running Logic and PCB version 5.0.
>>
>> This isn't a problem in schematic printouts, since there the design
>> name comes out as a pleasing string of heiroglyphics.
>>
>> Help appreciated.
>>
>> John
>
>This would be a good question to post on the PADS forum, but I think you
>can change the name of the design when you "Run" the "Print/Plot" menu, and
>there is a little text box for job name.
But Mentor Graphics wants you to use their new and WONDERFUL DX
Designer instead of that crappy old Logic ! It's so much easier and
works so seamless with PADS PCB !! NOT !!
Just pay the $3,000 per year or whatever so you can call them on the
phone everytime you have a problem that isn't obvious or isn't in the
manual.
I like pads and logic myself, but Mentor does not want anyone to use
Logic anymore for some very stupid reason. Thety obviously don't
use their own software (which they acquired and didn't write
themselves).
I use Eagle nowdays. It's priced well and there are LOTS of other
users on the net and lots of libraries AND free news.server continuing
support. That's what I like. Not quite as good as Pads in some
ways, but getting better all the time and they seem to listen to their
users. Some of their features I like better than PADS like the pan
and zooming.
boB
Joerg
Except it doesn't allow hierarchical sheet structures. That is IMHO a
huge disadvantage of Eagle. This input has been given many times over in
the forums but Cadsoft did not listen to that one. I am using Eagle
myself right now but only because I haven't found a viable alternative.
gEDA is rather strange with the power pins in multi-part packages. Kicad
does that nicely but has a raggedy looking title block and coordinate
frame, both of which cannot be customized well and cannot be removed at
all by the user.
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
JeffM
>I use Eagle [nowadays]. It's priced well
>
For payware--but not so well
when compared to gEDA and KiCAD (mentioned by Joerg).
--not to mention the **open source** nature of those 2.
>and there are LOTS of other users on the net
>
At one time, the ubiquity of EAGLE[1], its cross-platform status,
and their will-*read*-even-the-largest-files demo
were all pluses; now, not so much.
>and lots of libraries
>
Re-using someone else's symbols is a minefield.
Here's Cadsoft's BIG sticking point of the last few years: (DRM)
**EAGLE CAN LOCK YOU OUT OF YOUR WORK PRODUCT**
by Markus Zingg
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch.embedded/browse_frm/thread/f794e82d26b59e18/d7cf4149edb93ac7?q=*-*-website+reuse+paying.*+*-I-will-switch+cracked-*+*.would.not.help.*+zzz+after-*-*-version-*+copied+*.*.unlock.*.designs+*-*-*-*-exchange-*-*-*-*-third-party+reused+qq+*-*-single-bit-*-*-*-*+useless+*-*-*-projects-could-no-longer-be-opened
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=1jisj25b43ucaddcu...@4ax.com
BEFORE you start using Cadsoft's wares,
make sure you find out how to UN-BORK a file that they DRM
i.e. learn how to be a "pirate".
For the clueless out there:
DRM only hurts LEGIT customers and pisses them off.
When will these companies ever learn?
>AND free news.server continuing support.
>
Their news servers (1 ostensibly for user-to-user-help
and 1 ostensibly for factory support) are a good resource.
>[EAGLE is] getting better all the time
>
DRM was a **giant** step backwards.
Their cavalier attitude with regard to DRM
has changed the complexion of the company for me.
>and they seem to listen to their users.
>
Except where it REALLY counts, apparently.
.
.
[1] The acronym is properly written in all caps:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Easily-Applicable-Graphical-Layout.Editor
Hal Murray
>gEDA is rather strange with the power pins in multi-part packages. Kicad
>does that nicely but has a raggedy looking title block and coordinate
>frame, both of which cannot be customized well and cannot be removed at
>all by the user.
Can you dance around their klutzy frame and title block by ignoring
them and putting your own smaller frame inside their frame, and then
running some postscript postprocessing to crop down to what you want?
--
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.
Joerg
>> gEDA is rather strange with the power pins in multi-part packages. Kicad
>> does that nicely but has a raggedy looking title block and coordinate
>> frame, both of which cannot be customized well and cannot be removed at
>> all by the user.
>
> Can you dance around their klutzy frame and title block by ignoring
> them and putting your own smaller frame inside their frame, and then
> running some postscript postprocessing to crop down to what you want?
>
That's what I want to try next because it seems there is no interest in
the gEDA community to look at the power pin issue and none in the Kicad
community to look at the frame thing. I'd love to write corrected code
myself by I am not a programmer. Being a hardware guy it's tough to
figure out PS postprocessing, could use some more mainstream file format
and do a crop by hand. Won't be very precise though.
If I have my druthers I'll fire up the old OrCad SDT. It was perfect but
didn't do zoom, print and stuff too well in a DOS window. I'll have to
see if it's better in a virtual machine with a clean native DOS on
there. Printing will probably remain an issue.
Hal Murray
>If I have my druthers I'll fire up the old OrCad SDT. It was perfect but
>didn't do zoom, print and stuff too well in a DOS window. I'll have to
>see if it's better in a virtual machine with a clean native DOS on
>there. Printing will probably remain an issue.
You can probably do similar hacking on gerber files.
With postscript, you can probably print stuff with something
as simple as
cat fixit-stuff.ps bad-stuff.ps | lpr
where fixit.ps is a few lines of magic that redefines
the coordinate system. (The old border just falls through the cracks.)
Rich Webb
<notthis...@removethispacbell.net> wrote:
>Hal Murray wrote:
>>> gEDA is rather strange with the power pins in multi-part packages. Kicad
>>> does that nicely but has a raggedy looking title block and coordinate
>>> frame, both of which cannot be customized well and cannot be removed at
>>> all by the user.
>>
>> Can you dance around their klutzy frame and title block by ignoring
>> them and putting your own smaller frame inside their frame, and then
>> running some postscript postprocessing to crop down to what you want?
>>
>
>That's what I want to try next because it seems there is no interest in
>the gEDA community to look at the power pin issue and none in the Kicad
>community to look at the frame thing. I'd love to write corrected code
>myself by I am not a programmer. Being a hardware guy it's tough to
>figure out PS postprocessing, could use some more mainstream file format
>and do a crop by hand. Won't be very precise though.
I don't see any entries in the Features Request that contain "frame" or
"title," so it looks like nobody has actually initiated that yet:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=762479&group_id=145591&func=browse
I'm stuck with VS 2005 on the machine (it won't uninstall) and the Kicad
page does have a link to a "how to build from source" so I may give it a
go this weekend. At least enough to take a look at it. Who knows, it
might be easy! ;-)
--
Rich Webb Norfolk, VA
Joerg
> On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:30:30 -0800, Joerg
> <notthis...@removethispacbell.net> wrote:
>
>> Hal Murray wrote:
>>>> gEDA is rather strange with the power pins in multi-part packages. Kicad
>>>> does that nicely but has a raggedy looking title block and coordinate
>>>> frame, both of which cannot be customized well and cannot be removed at
>>>> all by the user.
>>> Can you dance around their klutzy frame and title block by ignoring
>>> them and putting your own smaller frame inside their frame, and then
>>> running some postscript postprocessing to crop down to what you want?
>>>
>> That's what I want to try next because it seems there is no interest in
>> the gEDA community to look at the power pin issue and none in the Kicad
>> community to look at the frame thing. I'd love to write corrected code
>> myself by I am not a programmer. Being a hardware guy it's tough to
>> figure out PS postprocessing, could use some more mainstream file format
>> and do a crop by hand. Won't be very precise though.
>
> I don't see any entries in the Features Request that contain "frame" or
> "title," so it looks like nobody has actually initiated that yet:
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=762479&group_id=145591&func=browse
>
Ok, I just took the liberty to add this as a request :-)
> I'm stuck with VS 2005 on the machine (it won't uninstall) and the Kicad
> page does have a link to a "how to build from source" so I may give it a
> go this weekend. At least enough to take a look at it. Who knows, it
> might be easy! ;-)
>
If I had more programming experience I'd also give it a shot. But this
weekend I'll be ripping out carpet. Orders from SWMBO :-)
Joerg
>> If I have my druthers I'll fire up the old OrCad SDT. It was perfect but
>> didn't do zoom, print and stuff too well in a DOS window. I'll have to
>> see if it's better in a virtual machine with a clean native DOS on
>> there. Printing will probably remain an issue.
>
> You can probably do similar hacking on gerber files.
>
> With postscript, you can probably print stuff with something
> as simple as
> cat fixit-stuff.ps bad-stuff.ps | lpr
> where fixit.ps is a few lines of magic that redefines
> the coordinate system. (The old border just falls through the cracks.)
>
My problem with those things begins with "a few lines of magic" :-)
qrk
<notthis...@removethispacbell.net> wrote:
>Hal Murray wrote:
>>> gEDA is rather strange with the power pins in multi-part packages. Kicad
>>> does that nicely but has a raggedy looking title block and coordinate
>>> frame, both of which cannot be customized well and cannot be removed at
>>> all by the user.
>>
>> Can you dance around their klutzy frame and title block by ignoring
>> them and putting your own smaller frame inside their frame, and then
>> running some postscript postprocessing to crop down to what you want?
>>
>
>That's what I want to try next because it seems there is no interest in
>the gEDA community to look at the power pin issue and none in the Kicad
>community to look at the frame thing. I'd love to write corrected code
>myself by I am not a programmer. Being a hardware guy it's tough to
>figure out PS postprocessing, could use some more mainstream file format
>and do a crop by hand. Won't be very precise though.
>
>If I have my druthers I'll fire up the old OrCad SDT. It was perfect but
>didn't do zoom, print and stuff too well in a DOS window. I'll have to
>see if it's better in a virtual machine with a clean native DOS on
>there. Printing will probably remain an issue.
I still use SDT386+ as my primary schematic tool. With macros and a
keyboard with the function keys on the left side of the keyboard, this
is a very efficient way of designing. SDT386+ and PCB386+ drivers have
been constantly upgraded over the past 12 years outside of Orcad.
The biggest improvement: you don't need a real DOS environment
anymore. SDT & PCB now run in a real window in W2k, XP, and supposedly
Vista. A team effort by two people created video drivers so SDT and
PCB make real Windows graphics calls. One guy wrote VESA drivers in
assembly and another guy recoded in C, then created the GDI drivers.
As for printing, all my schematics are printed out to PDF which makes
them searchable. My work colleague wrote a tricky batch file which
automatically resizes any size drawing to a paper space of your choice
using Ghostscript. I modified an Open Office font which creates text
that closely matches what you see on the screen. To print a schematic
file to PDF is one command line batch file.
If you like printing to laserjet printers, there are drivers available
to do that.
If you need a GIF drawing to paste the schematic in a document, there
are conversion tools available to do that or you can convert your PDF
to bit map.
Want to stack a bunch of pins on top of another? Composer has been
modified to allow that which is useful for FPGA parts with dozens of
power and ground pins. 27 ground pins only require one pin space on
the schematic.
All this can be found on
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OldDosOrcad/ . There are a bit over
300 members. The files section has new drivers and exe files to
support modern methods. Plus, there are a few dozen people who
actively use SDT and PCB on a daily basis which provide good
information on use and setup of old DOS Orcad.
If your customer wants Capture formated files, Capture imports SDT
files, and does a good job at it if its version 7 or newer.
SDT's back-end processing is so open that you can write your own
netlist formaters which we have done to support our PCB tools. The
intermediate ASCII netlist file that SDT spits out can be converted to
a netlist format of your liking.
---
Mark
Joerg
Wow, thanks, Mark. I did not know that new drivers had been written. My
version is SDT-III so I'll have to look around on the Yahoo group again,
maybe it can be resurrected. Now where are those disks ... oops, would
be 5-1/4" ... now where's that old 5-1/4" drive ...
This would be cool. Back then I thought OrCad SDT was the best thing
since pivot irrigation.
> As for printing, all my schematics are printed out to PDF which makes
> them searchable. My work colleague wrote a tricky batch file which
> automatically resizes any size drawing to a paper space of your choice
> using Ghostscript. I modified an Open Office font which creates text
> that closely matches what you see on the screen. To print a schematic
> file to PDF is one command line batch file.
>
> If you like printing to laserjet printers, there are drivers available
> to do that.
>
That would be an issue since not all printers are HP-LJ compatible
anymore. But if one can print to PDF that problem goes away. Yeehaw!
> If you need a GIF drawing to paste the schematic in a document, there
> are conversion tools available to do that or you can convert your PDF
> to bit map.
>
OrCad always put out nice bitmaps. In fact I did fully integrated docs
in MS-Word as early as 1989. Back then it was HPGL though and AFAIK
MS-Word has lost the ability to import that.
> Want to stack a bunch of pins on top of another? Composer has been
> modified to allow that which is useful for FPGA parts with dozens of
> power and ground pins. 27 ground pins only require one pin space on
> the schematic.
>
> All this can be found on
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OldDosOrcad/ . There are a bit over
> 300 members. The files section has new drivers and exe files to
> support modern methods. Plus, there are a few dozen people who
> actively use SDT and PCB on a daily basis which provide good
> information on use and setup of old DOS Orcad.
>
> If your customer wants Capture formated files, Capture imports SDT
> files, and does a good job at it if its version 7 or newer.
>
Yes, some clients would like Capture files.
> SDT's back-end processing is so open that you can write your own
> netlist formaters which we have done to support our PCB tools. The
> intermediate ASCII netlist file that SDT spits out can be converted to
> a netlist format of your liking.
>
OrCad has always been great with customizing. Then they were bought :-(
JosephKK
I can still hear the echoes of the save early and often lecture you
gave him. Or am i just overly hopeful?
qrk
I'm pretty sure that the new display drivers won't work under SDT-III,
only SDT386+. Boy, version 3 really goes back in time! I think I still
have a 5.25" floppy in my home machine for resurrecting those old
projects.
---
Mark
Joerg
It does go way back. In those days it was a rather young program, just a
few years old. Other than a minor printer driver glitch I found the
software to be bug-free. Amazing.
The driver glitch could be fixed if you wrote your own from a set of
generic routines which did not come with the package. So I called.
Forgot that I was nine time-hours away from Oregon but someone picked up
anyhow. "No, I am only cleaning up here but give me your address and
I'll place your request on an engineer's desk". No call back. Hmm. The
week after an airmail letter showed up, with a disk in there. Exactly
what I needed, allowed me to fix my printer problem. Now that was
customer service at its best.
John Larkin
wrote:
It's The Brat, and she had to learn PC layout in one week, the only
overlap with our guy who was leaving. That's a lot of stuff to cram
into one week.
She's finished one board, a little thing I threw together as a
practice project she could get done before he left. It's a gain-100,
DC- 1.5 GHz amplifier in a little box, with some hooks for use as a
photodiode amp and maybe an active signal pickoff. We're sending it
out for board fab today; if it works maybe we'll press release it as a
product.
John
JosephKK
<jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
That's reasonably challenging for a first go. Did the save lecture
occur?
JosephKK
Gussied up like that i think i would really like those tools. Is
there any way to properly buy them?
John Larkin
wrote:
Actually, she figured it out herself. Now she's started in on a rev of
a VME module... we have eight fast opamps squeezed side-by-side, and
they're doing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir imitation at 1 GHz. This
will take same serious placement and routing changes to fix.
(THS3201 current-mode opamps... 1.8 GHz, 10v/ns. Joerg will lecture me
fer sure.)
John
Rich Webb
I'm throwing in the towel on this one. It's probably *possible* to build
it with MSVC but, after going around and around with cmake and nmake,
I'm dying with a cubic butt-ton of unresolved linker errors about 70%+
into the process. The right way to do it would be to set up a proper gcc
environment, and that's not happening anytime soon.
I'll keep what I have in place, for now, if anyone wants to compare
notes.
Joerg
Thanks for trying and letting us know, Rich. I think I am going to stay
with Eagle for now and when there is a little more time I'll try Mark's
route and see if I can resurrect the old DOS-OrCad. That is still the
best, haven't seen anything that has reached its level of perfection.
There may have been a lot of progress with autorouters over the last 20
years but with schematic capture I don't quite see such a progress.
Rich Webb
<notthis...@removethispacbell.net> wrote:
Well, I'm not giving up altogether. I have room for mingw and msys,
which seem to be the mainline development environment for the MSWindows
executables. It will have to take its place in the FIFO, though...
Joerg
And FIFO content is determined by SWMBO. I just scored one more on the
list, the guides of a large drawer in the kitchen croaked. The rollers
are, of course, not available individually. Meaning it'll be contortion
and back pain time again. Harumph.
krw
<notthis...@removethispacbell.net> wrote:
You'd be surprised what sort of cabinet hardware you can find on the
web. I've replaced a bunch of stuff with pretty much original
hardware for SWMBO bonus points. Doesn't help the back though.
Joerg
Problem is the rollers are riveted to the guides. And the new guides are
2" shorter, it was all they had. I'll have to see if that is SWMBO
acceptable. Somehow the cabinet hardware in the US is mostly of the
flimsy kind. The stuff in the 100+ year old bedroom set and desks we
brought over is all still ok, zero maintenance. Our 100lbs Rottweiler
once stepped on the fully extended file cabinet of my office desk, to
have an "aerial look". Didn't budge a bit.
krw
Rollers are normally riveted to the guides. It's easier to replace
the whole thing than parts (match doesn't have to be perfect). Even
HomeDespot carries an assortment of guides with lengths in 2"
increments. There are a bunch of online stores I deal with that have
an even wider selection at about 1/2 the cost (if it matters).
> Somehow the cabinet hardware in the US is mostly of the
>flimsy kind. The stuff in the 100+ year old bedroom set and desks we
>brought over is all still ok, zero maintenance. Our 100lbs Rottweiler
>once stepped on the fully extended file cabinet of my office desk, to
>have an "aerial look". Didn't budge a bit.
Mostly, though good furniture has good guides (one way to tell the
real quality of the piece). I did pay an extra $15 per drawer (22)
for the soft-closing slides for the Amish dining room and bedroom sets
I bought in Ohio last year. The two rooms of furniture were $15K, so
the few hundred for the top-o-the-line slides wasn't that big of a
deal. ;-)
Joerg
But the selection always ends at 24" and it's a 26" :-(
Unless you go mail order maybe but I don't want yet another project.
>> Somehow the cabinet hardware in the US is mostly of the
>> flimsy kind. The stuff in the 100+ year old bedroom set and desks we
>> brought over is all still ok, zero maintenance. Our 100lbs Rottweiler
>> once stepped on the fully extended file cabinet of my office desk, to
>> have an "aerial look". Didn't budge a bit.
>
> Mostly, though good furniture has good guides (one way to tell the
> real quality of the piece). I did pay an extra $15 per drawer (22)
> for the soft-closing slides for the Amish dining room and bedroom sets
> I bought in Ohio last year. The two rooms of furniture were $15K, so
> the few hundred for the top-o-the-line slides wasn't that big of a
> deal. ;-)
Well, you can't really go wrong with Amish furniture. They still make
the good stuff and most likely always will. Our stuff was made where
those guys originally came from ;-)
krw
<notthis...@removethispacbell.net> wrote:
When I've looked in various HomeDespots, they also have 18, 20, and
22". Have you looked on line?
>Unless you go mail order maybe but I don't want yet another project.
Three days, and you'll have the part. I buy most stuff online
anymore. It's cheaper and there is a lot better selection.
>>> Somehow the cabinet hardware in the US is mostly of the
>>> flimsy kind. The stuff in the 100+ year old bedroom set and desks we
>>> brought over is all still ok, zero maintenance. Our 100lbs Rottweiler
>>> once stepped on the fully extended file cabinet of my office desk, to
>>> have an "aerial look". Didn't budge a bit.
>>
>> Mostly, though good furniture has good guides (one way to tell the
>> real quality of the piece). I did pay an extra $15 per drawer (22)
>> for the soft-closing slides for the Amish dining room and bedroom sets
>> I bought in Ohio last year. The two rooms of furniture were $15K, so
>> the few hundred for the top-o-the-line slides wasn't that big of a
>> deal. ;-)
>
>
>Well, you can't really go wrong with Amish furniture. They still make
>the good stuff and most likely always will. Our stuff was made where
>those guys originally came from ;-)
;-)
Interesting place. They're not grid connected (against their
"religion"), but have their own diesel generators for lights and power
tools.
Joerg
Yeah, if SWMBO ain't happy with the 24" I got I'll order online. Better
than hearing complaints about it every other week :-)
>>>> Somehow the cabinet hardware in the US is mostly of the
>>>> flimsy kind. The stuff in the 100+ year old bedroom set and desks we
>>>> brought over is all still ok, zero maintenance. Our 100lbs Rottweiler
>>>> once stepped on the fully extended file cabinet of my office desk, to
>>>> have an "aerial look". Didn't budge a bit.
>>> Mostly, though good furniture has good guides (one way to tell the
>>> real quality of the piece). I did pay an extra $15 per drawer (22)
>>> for the soft-closing slides for the Amish dining room and bedroom sets
>>> I bought in Ohio last year. The two rooms of furniture were $15K, so
>>> the few hundred for the top-o-the-line slides wasn't that big of a
>>> deal. ;-)
>>
>> Well, you can't really go wrong with Amish furniture. They still make
>> the good stuff and most likely always will. Our stuff was made where
>> those guys originally came from ;-)
>
> ;-)
>
> Interesting place. They're not grid connected (against their
> "religion"), but have their own diesel generators for lights and power
> tools.
>
The Diesels are for fridges AFAIR. The laws made them do that.
krw
notthis...@removethispacbell.net says...>
No fridges in a furniture showroom/factory. Gas would be
better/cheaper than a generator just for the fridges.