Often I find myself in the middle of a complicated design, and for some external reason a new circuit needs to be added. The circuit has been incorporated in a design before – all the components have been created with footprints, supplier information, and company part numbers. In the Altium schematic editor, my designs have been set up for easy design re-use, so I can copy this schematic page from my old design to the new design, then add it to the new pcb design relatively painlessly. However, once we move into the pcb layout editor, all that past work is lost.
The problem comes in because components have unique IDs related to their hierarchical path. Altium’s “go-to” pcb layout re-use tool is Snippets, and if you try to include components in a Snippet, the path is not painless. There are some ways to do it if you have the patience – you can read about it here. However, sometimes it seems easier just to re-place all the components. This pain led me to develop a plugin (adding features slowly as I thought of them) which allowed me to store and load component placement information.
In my previous article, I showed how easy it was to recall component placement information from a previous design. However, it was clear in the video that quite a bit of information had to be stored in the parameters for each component in the schematic page in order for the automation to work. Isn’t that a pain to set up?
In the video below, watch to see how easily this information is stored: