On 07:47 AM 7/01/2002 -0500, Sean James said: >Does anybody know of a routine that would completely "flip" a board to help >with laying out bottom mount smt components? For all you old timers out >there, this is similar to flipping the whole artwork in order to tape the >solder side etch. >Sean James >PCB Designer
Sean, Protel does not allow flipping of the board. Flipping sections with the X and Y shortcuts while moving a selection is a recipe for disaster - don't do it unless you are very careful and have experimented before hand. It can exercise a bug in Protel where some entities become sort-of invisible. Also, flipping sections does not preserve the relationship between tracks and components - components are flipped in place rather than moved with the tracks - but this is a nuisance, it is not the bug. (The bug does not seem to be destructive in that, at least from memory, you can save the file and open it again and the invisible entities re-appear. Geoff Harland and I were working on a PCB flipping server that would take the whole database and flip it. It was while developing this that we found the above bug. There are difficulties with flipping the drill-pairs (from memory) that we never did solve. Also, due to "issues" in the SDK different sort of move operations had to be done for different sorts of entities. Theer were also issues with getting the undo stack operating correctly. It was messy but we did have something that was inverting most of the entities relatively bug free. This development has pretty much stopped. I wrote a screen utility that shows an inverted always-on-top window on your screen of the region around your cursor. I use this for placing bottom side designators (mainly). It is available at: http://www.considered.com.au/Protel01.htm It is the CSFlipViewer server. You can set up menu items to allow X and/or Y flips. Some combinations of which can cause interesting oscillatory patterns when the mouse cursor approaches the floating flip window. Also, under some video card drivers and some versions of Windows you can get video noise when the mouse moves close to an edge of the screen. Win2k seems to be much better behaved in this regard than Win98 - possibly due to better multi-monitor support. Ian Wilson * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
