Hi all, been using Designspark PCB for a while. Quite like it - much better component creation than my memory of Eagle and hasn't crashed on me once so far.Had PCBs fabricated for double sided power supply board of what I'd term medium complexity and everything worked 100% first time so I am a happy customer so far. Now developing a larger 4 layer board with ~400 components and I have a few thoughts on how the s/w could be improved.
I am still on 7.1 so perhaps some of this is already in 7.2?
It would be excellent if when using the auto router you could assign nets to particular board layers. I know you can assign one net per layer with a power plane but in my current design I would like to use top and bottom copper for signals, 2nd layer for power rails of +/-15V and 3rd layer for a ground plane. So ideally I would use a ladder style layout for the +-15V rails on layer 2, draw the vertical rails myself, then assign the nets to the layer with a horizontal layout bias to get the ladder structure automatically. Can't really go wrong, and it is a big time saver vs doing it all manually for a lot of components.
When routing signals, I would also like to be able to assign particular nets to top copper and bottom copper for example. I do not think this feature currently exists?
When viewing nets it would be good to disable and re-enable the rats nest as required to keep the design clearer on more complex boards whilst leaving power/ground rails for last connection (if needed). I know I could select nets from the navigator, then delete them and re-enable by forwarding the schematic design again but this is clunky. For example I want to often fill the ground plane as the last part of a design so I keep the freedom to move around vias and through hole components without ruining a fill - but I do not want to see the ground rats nest of a complex design while I work on the rest of the nets.
Second request is that it would be great if a project file could offer a find/replace option over all or some schematics for components. For example my current prototype uses all through hole parts because it is easy to rework them if I want to make changes when it is populated, but in the future I would like to shrink the design to SMD. Some might argue this is my own fault for not going direct to SMD directly but that's the choice that was made. If I was to make an SMD mk2 version I would ideally duplicate the prototype project, copy the library parts that were to be altered to new versions such as Part -> Part_SMD then associate the new SMD footprint with the copied part. At this point it would be very handy to perform a component find/replace on all of these parts whilst maintaining pin connections in the schematic and then forward to PCB. Of course this would only work if the number of pins was maintained, if pin numbering was different this would be taken care of in the new component pin assignment. E.g. in current design I have about 50 PDIP ICs which if converted to SOIC or TSSOP would take a very long time manually, not to mention 350 other passives after. If I simply convert the existing components and update the design I loose my 'mk1' version of the project
Best regards, Owain