How to Change Orientation of Entire UB Design

[ajt]

I have a board designed in Ultiboard and need to change the whole thing 90 CW in orientation as I look at it.  I'm talking of *everything* including the board outline, components, copper, etc. This is a small board and if I could even rotate the outline and all the components that would be a big help but, of course, if the copper can be rotated as well that would be best.

Is there a way to do this?

[lacy]

Absolutely it can be done. Goto EDIT>SELECT ALL. Once you see the board highlighted go back to EDIT>ORIENTATION and select which direction to rotate it in.

A simpler method would be to right click on the a blank area of the board and click SELECT ALL and then use the rotation buttons in the tool bar. Mine arlocated just above the workspace window on the far right of the screen.

Hope this give you what you need.

[ajt]

(I'm typing in this reply for the second time as the forum software threw an error and crashed on the first attempt!!)

I tried that before my post.  It doesn't work as the menu picks and toolbar buttons are grayed out.  This is with all selection filters on and all layers enabled.  Selecting all, right-clicking, and choosing Properties puts up a dialog saying "There is no common property page for this selection".  This is not correct as orientation is (should be) a common attribute to all objects and is likely related to this problem.

Further attempts show that if the Via selection filter is on (either by itself or with others), the orientation controls are no longer grayed out.  This means there is no way to rotate an entire design... but it gets worse.  If I turn on all but the Vias selection filter, select all, and click one of the orientation controls UB totally crashes and exits!

There is a major issue here!

[ajt]

I think I have most of this mystery solved.  First off, the design I was trying to rotate had some vias locked and this was keeping the orientation controls grayed.  If I unlock them and select all everything rotates as it should except the KI-KO areas.  One idiosyncrasy is that the KI-KO layer has to be selected (highlighted on the layers tab) for a KI-KO to be selected.  If you do the select-all with the KI-KO layer selected, everything is selected and rotates correctly.  

Now...  why UB didn't warn me of the locked vias but refused to enable the controls, tell me there was no common properties (which was wrong), and totally crash if I turned off the via filter to get the controls enabled is a big problem as I see it.  First off... NOTHING the user does should ever cause software to crash.  Secondly, UI consistency is important and in this case there are times when the lock state of an object results in a dialog and in this case it did not.  Was I stupid to try to rotate everything when some parts were locked and not notice that the KI-KO area wasn't selected? Maybe so… but the (expensive) software was NO help in advising of my errors and, worse, crashed repeatedly as I tried to solve the problem.

 

There are still issues as I have another design imported from UB9 that I cannot rotate a specific part on (maybe others... I only tried this one part).  I can rotate the same part on a fresh UB10 design.  In this case (the UB9 design in UB10) I can rotate it 90 degrees but if I try to rotate another 90 degrees UB crashes!  BTW- using Ctrl-R has all the same problems as other methods to rotate.  I can use the Angle function to rotate the 180 degrees I want but as soon as I try to move the component I just rotated, UB crashes. The only way I could get this to work was to laterally move the part off the board, rotate it and move it back into place which obviously is not acceptable.

 I can move on in my specific designs now but overall I and others wioll hit these problems over again.  It sounds to me like it is high severity bug fix time resulting in a new build released!!!

[lacy]

What needs to be done at this is point is for NI to read this post and determine if this is a software problem that you have come across. If it is then it needs to be corrected. IMHO, I believe it is a software error as you should have had some type of warning that what you were about to attempt is not legal while parts are locked on the board, etc.

As far as the UB9 issue you describe, I am going to have to defer that to someone who has UB9 and can try it. I do not have UB9 so I can't really answer this question.

[ajt]

I've submitted a formal support request on this as it is a big problem.  In continuing to work with UB10.1 with designs started in UB9, crashes are so prevalent making any progress is near impossible. 

Is anyone else experiencing these problems??? 

[Tien_P]

I noticed there are several inconsistencies when rotating the entire design, for example, if there is a power plane in the design and you do a Select All and then Ctrl+R, the design doesn't rotate. The work around for this is to group everything by selecting Edit >>select all and then Edit>>Group selection, doing this will allow you to rotate the design. I also noticed that the keepout area does get rotated even when you group it with other objects, the only way is select it by itself and then rotate it. Because of this inconsistency I will report it as a bug. As for the crashes that were mentioned in this thread, you are right under no circumstance should Ultiboard crash and when it does we like to know about it. At if you are able to provide us with step by step instruction, it will be very helpful. From my experiences, I have found that most crashes are isolated to something in a file and this is why we like to see your file when Ultiboard crash.

[dbur]

I used to have crashes all the time, especially when working on large designs.  I was quite aggrevated about it.  This was on a PC that worked pretty reliably with all other apps.  When I moved to a new PC all the problems went away.  MS & UB now are very stable.  I believe I still can on very rare occasions experience a crash, but not often enough I can remember any details other than it's when I get a lot going on and maybe try to do multiple actions when it's still thinking about something.

Turns out the computer I had trouble with has trouble with the memory I had installed.  It eventually got bad enough I started having problems with other apps.  I'm not saying this is what your problem is, but it could be.