[sdiy] Pulsonix PCB design software

[Tom Wiltshire]

One (unfortunate) side-effect of the Diptrace way of doing this is that you have to keep an eye on which way up you have the op-amps. I once screwed up a PCB layout by rearranging op-amps like this, but then failing to notice that I’d vertically flipped some of them (to get +ve and -ve input more convenient for the schematic). So I wired the right op-amps in the right places, but got completely the wrong wires connected up. Didn’t notice until the prototype PCB utterly failed to do what it was supposed to. I kicked myself for that one.

But otherwise, I think it’s logical. You’ve got parts, you can move them about. Straightforward. You just have to be careful doing it.

Tom

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       Electric Druid
Synth & Stompbox DIY
==================

> On 27 Jul 2017, at 20:31, epk <electronicpresskit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Ah, that's a great tip! I wish I would have discovered that. I emailed support and posted in the dt forum about this issue and got no reply :(
> 
> Since wires are not anchored to the parts in kicad, you can just hover and hit m to move the part out of the way and the desired one in. Alternatively you can hover and hit e to edit the part via popup menu.
> 
> epk
> 
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 9:17 PM, Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> > On 27 Jul 2017, at 00:08, electronicpresskit <electronicpresskit at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > One thing that irked me was that the user can change the part number of a multi-part package, however the pin numbers don’t update to reflect the change. So the user must delete the part and create a new one. This would be less of a problem, except that the wires disappear so you need to remember all the connections. I like to optimize which opamp I use depending on adjacent components when placing parts on a board so it can really add some time and increases the chance of error.
> >
> > There are more, but my head has been out of dt for a while…see my comments about zoom and hotkeys below.
> 
> If I’m understanding you, you’re taking about re-arranging op-amps to make the layout easier, right?
> 
> This is something I do frequently too. The “Diptrace way” of doing this is to literally disconnect the op-amps and rearrange them, rather than changing the part numbers. It’s simple enough. If you want the first op-amp in a package doing a certain job, you disconnect the one that’s there (right click menu) and drop the other one in instead and then press “connect wires” in the right-click menu.
> 
> Now, if I was trying to be all annoying about it, that’s one of those things that could be described as “user error”, but really it’s just down to the different ways and styles that these different packages use, and that people start to assume are “standard”. They’re not. There is no “standard”. It might be nice if there was, but it’s probably too complicated a problem for a single solution to ever make sense.
> 
> Tom
> 
>