At 09:46 AM 9/11/2003, Website Visitor wrote:
I been digging in the docs and trying experiments to try to get an old old
DOS-based Orcad netlist into my copy of Protel 99SE so at the least I
can do the layout changes and not pay someone else to.. My only conclusion
is that I will have to manually reformat it by hand to a Protel or Protel2
format then import it. Can someone please tell me this is not the case and
advice to a more intelligent method or am I doomed to suffer the loss of
income?
To my knowledge Protel only imports Protel or Protel2 format. You can write
from Schematic any of many formats including the older OrCAD format, but
PCB doesn't read them.
However, I have two comments:
It is not usually very difficult to reformat a net list. Even where a net
list is differently organized, such as a list with the pin name as the
first field of each record and the net as the second, I've used Excel to
resort and modify the information to make such a list into a Tango or
Protel format list. By the way, if you've access to, say, and OrCAD
schematic that you could read with OrCAD, you could output a Protel or
Tango netlist instead of OrCAD format. (I forget which one it is called,
might be Protel.)
I seem to remember a net list translation program from RSI. So I search and
find, yes:
http://www.rsi-inc.com/Products/Translation/netlist/omninet.html
Now, in the murkiness of my memory, there might have been a demo version of
Omninet, or perhaps someone has written a translator.
So will you have to manually reformat it by hand? If it is a small
netlist, reformating it with Excel would be a few minutes work. With a
longer list, you might want to spend some time thinking about how to do the
job.
I used to write utilities all the time with QuickBasic and I still use some
of them. But you can do a lot with Word and Excel, perhaps with some macros
Okay, my memory was correct that the old OrCAD net list is organized by
components, each component is listed with its information, then the pins
are listed, and each pin has the net name as a second field.
It's much harder to describe how to do it than it is to do it, once you
have the idea, but being rather obsessed with providing user support:
So here is how I'd do the translation:
This is the OrCAD format for two components, and I've replaced spaces with
asterisks just so you can see what is being done:
You don't have to have a parts section in a Protel netlist, as I recall, so
I'm not going to bother with it at the moment. It is much easier to convert
the component records into a parts section than it is to deal with the net
records: you'll see a point in the process where you could easily extract
the component data and create, in a similar way, the part section.
Notice that the part records begin with *( and the pin records begin with
**(. (To put in a tab in the Replace menu, use ^t. Return is ^p.) For
simplicity, I'll get rid of the first asterisk in each record since it
occurs in every record except the very first and the very last. (Replace
^p* with ^p).
Since what is below would not mean much if you don't know it, I'll repeat
this: ^t stands for TAB in a Word replacement dialog, and ^p stands for
RETURN, i.e., New Line.
)
(*0009*0805*C9*10n
*(*1*GND*)
*(*2*VCC*)
)
(*0010*0805*C10*10n
*(*1*5VP*)
*(*2*PGND*)
)
for this to work, it might be a good idea to have a close parenthesis in
the first line, I've added it. (This turns out to have been useless but I
don't want to edit everything below!)
Now, the reference designator is in field 4, and the pin number is in field
3 and the net name in field 4. I need to get the reference designator in
front of the pin number, ultimately, with a hyphen in between them. I'll
want the hyphen in field 5 with the pin name. So I want to add three field
separators to the pin records plus the hyphen.
So replace ^p* with ^p- and then -(* with -
This will give us
)
(*0009*0805*C9*10n
-1*GND*)
-2*VCC*)
)
(*0010*0805*C10*10n
-1*5VP*)
-2*PGND*)
)
replacing * with ^t will allow us to paste this directly into Excel. It
becomes in Excel
)
( 9 805 C9 10n
-1 GND )
-2 VCC )
)
( 10 805 C10 10n
-1 5VP )
-2 PGND)
)
Now I want to put the reference designator in front of every part number.
To do this, I want to be able to resort the list, add a formula to some
fields, and then get it back into its original order with the added material.
So I insert a column (i.e., a field), put a 1 in the first record's first
field, then put the formula =A1+1 in the first field of the second record
and Fill Down, giving me a line-numbered list. To prevent these numbers
from changing with the sort, I need to replace them with text instead of a
formula. So I copy
