| ID: | 5778 |
| From: | rn...@igor2.repo.hu |
| Date: | Thu, 11 Aug 2022 08:48:42 +0200 (CEST) |
| Subject: | [pcb-rnd] sch-rnd: new: auto-number unnamed syms for compilation and renumber plugin |
| replies: | 5779 from rn...@igor2.repo.hu |
Hi all,
I am gradually redirecting traffic from the cschem mailing list to this
mailing list now that sch-rnd is reaching beta testing phase.
(There's been reduced traffic on this list in 2022 because most
development effort went into sch-rnd while pcb-rnd got mostly bugfixes.
Now that I am merging the mailing list, we'll get back our normal traffic
volume.)
Erich started to test sch-rnd on real boards and reported a lot of bugs
and misfeatures. These two are related to the situation when you place a
lot of symbols initially.
Note: in the cschem model groups have the "name" attribute to name them.
This is true to symbols as well. In other systems there are different
attribute/property keys to name things, like "refdes" for the name of a
symbol. So whenever you see "name" in the context of symbols, it is what
we often call "refdes" in other systems.
We have two new features:
1. name "unnamed" (R??) symbols for compilation
There is a convention to have library symbols' name field contain the
right prefix but "??" suffix instead of number. So a resistor symbol's
initial name is R??, a capacitor's is C??, an opamp's U??, etc. I've
followed this convention in the standard lib.
When you initially place them, this means you will get a lot of symbols
that will be combined into the same component during compilation due to
name match. This may cause attribute collisions (compilation errors),
especially if you start assigning different values and footprints before
actually naming your symbols.
To overcome this inconvenience, I've implemented an optional feature, on
by default, which renames "?" ending symbols to autogenerated unique named
symbols during compilation. Note: this code does _not_ change your
drawing, the concrete model, it changes only the abstract model. So your
symbols are still named R?? and C?? and so on, until you rename them.
It's a similar mechanism how unnamed nets are automatically named. There
is a big difference tho: in case of networks, we have to name every
network at the end of the day. In case of symbols if a symbol does not
have a name attribute, that means you do not want it to show up in the
output ("netlist"). So this feature does not _create_ a name attribute on
symbols, it only transforms existing names if they are ending in one or
more "?" characters, assuming these are "yet-to-be-named" symbols.
The feature can be disabled via the plugins/std_cschem/fix_unnamed_syms
config node.
2. renumber plugin: CLI and GUI
Once you are done with arranging your symbols, you definitely want to name
them, tho. You can go and manually do this symbol by symbol (quickest way
is hotkey {a a}), but sch-rnd now also offers a way to semi-automate it.
We have a Renumber() action and a RenumberDialog() action. The dialog is
also accessible via the menu:
edit/change multiple objects/renumber symbols.
The dialog shows and explains all arguments to the Renumber() action. The
action takes all selected symbols (or all symbols on the sheet) and starts
renumbering them from the specified base number (1 by default). It tries
to assign numebrs per prefix (i.e. counting separately for R's, C's, U's,
and whatever non-numeric name prefixes you used) but it also makes sure it
does not assing a name that is already in use on the sheet by a symbol you
are not renaming.
There is a sort argument that tells how symbols-to-be-renumbered should be
sorted before renumbering. This affects how the numbering goes,
e.g. left-to-right or right-to-left.
The typical use cases:
- you are lazy, and just renumber everything on your sheet, e.g. once it's
already too messy
- your drawing contains sections; you select everything within a section
and renumber them with a base of 100, so you get R100, R101, R102, etc;
then you renumber another section starting from 200, etc.
Unlike the feature discussed in 1., the renumber plugin really renames
your symbols on the drawing (in the concrete model).
Note: at the moment the action works on sheet basis. Later we may extend
this to project basis (so that naming collisions are avoided not only
within the sheet, but within the project). We may also introduce more
sorting methods, those are cheap to implement.
Note: this is all in a plugin, and is not part of the official cschem
specification. I consider this an optional feature; some users may want to
have it differently. They can implement their idea in an user script. They
can even disable the renumber plugin and implement an user script with the
same actions to replace it!
Best regards,
Igor2
Reply subtree:
5778 [pcb-rnd] sch-rnd: new: auto-number unnamed syms for compilation and renumber plugin from rn...@igor2.repo.hu
5779 Re: [pcb-rnd] sch-rnd: new: auto-number unnamed syms for compilation from rn...@igor2.repo.hu