Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:In 99SE, this would be controlled by a Design Rule, and the choices for scope are Board, Footprint, Component/Class, Net/Class, Pad Class and Specification. I'm a little surprised not to see "via" there....
Look harder. It is there and always has been. It is located just below "Pad Specification"
duh. as is the rest, i.e., Via Specification, Footprint-Pad, and Region. I overlooked the slider....
Now, in DXP, it seems to be a little more complicated.
I looked and could not come up with a way to do it, so I gave up after wasting an hour. So much for the claim by the Protel sales person that if you are an experienced user of 99SE, there is absolutely no learning curve to be just as productive in DXP.
I'd say that was puffery.
A learning curve is involved only if you chose to take advantage of additional powerful features. Would you call that a blatant lie, an ignoramus telling the truth as he knew it, or in our politically correct world a poor victim of capitalist society merely taking liberties with the truth in order to earn enough commission to feed his family?
I'd say somewhere between the second and the last, it can be hard to tell the difference (though I don't know if Protel salespeople get commissions). It is not entirely false, i.e., much of the basic functionality is the same, but enough functions have changed in some way to cause delay as one figures out how to do it in DXP. How much impact this has on productivity, I can't personally say, because I haven't pushed a job through DXP yet. But it will have an impact in the short term, I have no doubt.
In real life, I'd ask the question on the DXP list, not here, if I wanted to get the fastest and best answers.
What I was specifically trying to do in DXP was to have all vias connect to the planes without thermal reliefs.
Well, I defined a via specification scope direct-connect rule in 99SE (unchecking all the specifications so that it applied to all vias), then I imported the board to DXP. I did get a rule with the same name, but the scope did not mention vias... just All.
And I don't see via or pad scopes in DXP Power Plane Connection Style rules. What am I missing?
(In 99SE, to reiterate, one may, for example, give free pads a PadName and then use Free-PadName in the scope, allowing one to control connection style and other characteristics like Solder Mask Expansion, pad-by-pad simply by editing the pad name. Or one could have one size of via that is, say, tented, and one size that is not.)
The DXP way, as I understand it, would be to create a Query that selects the objects to be affected by the rule. I can create a Query that selects Vias with the Build Query command, but I don't see how to connect this with the Rule, the "Query Builder" button in the Rule window does pop up a query dialog, but the required options (Via, for example) are not there.... There has got to be a way.
If I were trying to get a job out, having managed to get it designed in DXP and now I'm just trying to finish the details, I'd be fairly upset! (And, as I said, I'd ask on the DXP list. But my own motive here is to explore a bit what it is like to move to DXP as an old hand with 99SE, to find the rough edges.)
And I'm not thrilled that the rule from the 99SE file did not survive import. (But maybe it did and I'm just not understanding what I'm seeing....)
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