Well, as you suggest below, Groups are essentially a way of tagging
different parts, so they would be completely independent of the physical
layers - and the connectivity checker.
** Confusingly, PCB already has "layer groups", which consist of
multiple "layers". A layer group is what ends up physically as a plane
of copper in your produced board. Your terminology reverses the meaning,
with a "layer group" consisting of logically grouped parts spanning
multiple physical layers.
I presume you intend to get rid of PCB's existing layer group
functionality (good riddance IMO), however it would be less confusing to
pick a new name. Perhaps "logical group".
Yes, absolutely! But I cannot think of a good name :) "logical group"
is too long and ambiguous. Right now I am using "Group", but that's
even less useful.
First I thought "functional group" would be good, but what you describe
- a construct
of functional interdependence spread on several layers in mechanical CAD
is in many
cases called a "block" or "module".
The concepts of layers + layer groups (hierarchical layers in mech-CAD)
is orthogonal
to blocks. E.g. you can turn visibility on and off for each independently.
For the sake of visual collision detection in the case of EDA 3 levels
of visibilty
as suggested may be in order: coloured/saturated, greyed out and invisible.
Esp. useful I envision the possibility to grey out blocks one does not
work on
while they stay visible.
Being able to reuse a block independently of the layout it was created
it, like in
mechanical CAD would be very welcome here as well (did I miss something?)
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