In the past I have seen special character issues with netlists across foreign country boundaries. For example, in some countries they use a comma as the decimal "point" and NXP also has those dreaded "...,215" in some part numbers. That can blow a netlist out of the water.
How about a real decimal point (a dot) inside a footprint?
Main reason I ask is for mounting hole designators. A client wants all this in metric dimensions and that will require fractions of a millimeter. For clarity I'd like to list that as "4.5MM_DRILL" footprint or similar. If dots are not allowed I could only use 4500UM_DRILL" or such and that's less understandable.
We delete extra characters in our parts database. TO247, not TO-247. But decimal points are necesssary. We haven't seen any problems with that, but we rarely send BOMs outside the company.
You could adapt the dreaded 4K7 convention: 4MM5drill.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
You should elaborate... the netlist to which you refer is a PCB netlist, NOT a simulation netlist.
However, in simulation netlists one should avoid non-alphanumeric characters, except that "underscore" is usually allowed. ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 | It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
The original justification was that decimal points were somehow fragile and got lost on drawings, so the wrong parts values got installed. It was nonsense of course.
I just frosted a Guinness Cake, which involved using 1cup25 of powdered sugar.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
Since we have SI units, and accepted scientific notation, why do some people use the insane and ambiguous 6v8 style? That seems to be mostly amateurs and audio people.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
The problem with descriptive filenames is you can never be certain if there is a different file somewhere with the same name. The problem occurs when you try to copy to file to another folder that contains a file with the same name.
My solution to the problem is to rename the file to the hex date and time the file was created. This gives an 8-digit filename that can never be duplicated anywhere on the disk since "now" only happens once.
So what happens to the description?
I generate an index for every file in the folder. It contains the hex filename, the date it was last modified, the size, several indicators such as the most recently viewed, and the description.
When I need to copy the file somewhere, I wrote a file management software that copies the file and the index entry to the new folder, so the file and its index remain tied together.
There are many advantages to this system. I can create a global list of every file on my hard disk, and search it with a modified Boyer-Moore scan to find a desired file. It's pretty fast.
For example, here are the results for a search for "Larkin":
Searched 523,940 files in 5,861 directories
Found 125 hits in 539.000 ms
A search for "Hobbs" gives
Searched 523,940 files in 5,861 directories
Found 74 hits in 68.217 ms
Note the second search is almost ten times faster. This is because the global index is already in Window's cache so it doesn't have to be read from the disk.
Statistically, the number of hits in the above searches doesn't mean much.
Many of the files are LTspice files that double the number of hits since they have an ASC and a PLT file with the same hex identifier.
Some Zener diodes use the form 6V2 in their part numbers
Takes less space also.
As for 0.47uF, I always add the leading zero.
Also, on schematics, I have learned to not use 4-way tie points because of the sometimes ambiguity of the wire crossing or connecting whether or not the dot is huge and visible.
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