End-to-end design in Protel Schematic and Autotrax

This falls under the ehading of "dumb questions" for some, I'm sure.

In Schematic, semiconductor elements appear with their pins labelled with their function (A/K, E/B/C etc) whereas POST expects 1,2 (,3) etc to be able to generate a valid netlist - otherwise none of the connections to these semis appear in the netlist when imported into AutoTrax. I suppose one could laboriously assign net labels to *each* connection, but I'm sure there is a neater and simpler way. I'm curious to discover how others address this.

Reply to
budgie
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Use SLM.EXE to change the pin numbers from B C E to 1 2 3 Alan

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Reply to
Alan

yebbut ....

That infers that all (for instance) transistors using a TO-92D or whatever footprint have the same pinout - which regrettably they don't. That was what I was trying to avoid, as it fixes one problem and creates a new one - a trap whenever a TO-92D footprint component with a different pinout was selected.

Certainly valid with diodes though - despite the lack of standardisation in transistors there aren't too many diode pinout variations ;-)

Reply to
budgie

their

You can only go so far with generic footprints. What I used to do was create a seperate schematic component, and a seperate footprint for every component I used. This takes time, but eventually it pays off when you have a good library. Fortunatly you can usually adapt existing footprints to use for you components. I also used to maintain a library of footprints from the IPC standards as well, so normally it just required a cut and paste and your fottprint was completed.

Reply to
The Real Andy

their

Not easy to do a cut and paste in autotrax/schmatic or slm. However if you name a new component you can then copy an existing component's attributes and make suitable changes. So you could have a library of transistors listed by part number or listed by footprint. If listed by part number then it means creating a new part in slm each time you use a new part but the advantage is that you just refer to say BC107 or 2N2222 without worrying about remembering the footprint number. If using the footprint then generate say TO-92a, TO-92b, TO-92c, etc as separate components (pretty quick to do with new, copy attributes, etc) then make a layout with all the footprints on it and print it out for easy reference!

You can do the same for SMD parts as well. By the way it is possible to use multiple libraries in schmatic (just in case you didn't know) although I always have to work out how to change libraries each time I want to (old age I think!)

Alan

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Alan

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