At 11:30 AM 5/14/01 -0700, Rimas Avizienis wrote:
[On behalf of Tim Madden]
>>Say I am designing a PCB in Protel, and I have placed components
>>on the top layer on the board. if I decide it is better to have
>>that circuit on the bottom of the board, is there any way to flip
>>a completed placement to the bottom?
>>
>>The problem I have is that if I flip the components, each component
>>is individually flipped, leaving resulting placement backwards.
>>If I select a group of components, and use the menu commands:
>>Edit->Move->Flip Components, the whole selection is mirrored.
>>This is perfect except it remains on the top layer of the board.
>>Flipping this mirrored placement to the bottom creates an ugly mess
>>which has backward placement of mirrored components.
Protel should have a flip block command that would properly treat components.
When a block is flipped from one side to the other with the L command, the
components are moved to the bottom and are properly mirrored, but the track
and vias stay in position, even though they flip layers.
Essentially, there are two kinds of flips. One flip would be used with
through-hole components, where one wants to move the top side routing to
the bottom and the bottom side to the top. The L key will do this. It will
also move an individual component from the top to the bottom, and it
mirrors it when it does this.
When attempting to move both track and components, the commands treat both
the same as if they were being moved separately, so components are mirrored
and track is not. (Technically, the track *is* mirrored as seen from the
other side, but that's not what we mean by "mirror," but it *is* what we
need when moving components, since bottom side components are placed from
the bottom. It's easy to see why Protel got confused.)
What is needed is a process which will swap top and bottom *and* mirror
both track and components.
We've been discussing this quite a bit. A server was written which would
flip a whole board, which could be used to flip a block by writing the
block to a scratch pcb and flipping it. Perhaps the author could be
persuaded to make it available again.
There are complications when flipping a board which has more than two
layers! Again, we've discussed various ways of handling this; I don't
recall how the server dealt with the problem, but the basic idea at the
outset was to have the server mirror absolutely everything, including the
stack. It would be exactly the same as turning the whole board over.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Abdulrahman Lomax
P.O. Box 690
El Verano, CA 95433
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