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Control_Dir
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Adding 3D Information in Ultiboard
Object Selection in Ultiboard
I'm back with more perspective from a Circuit Design Suite developer after 2 weeks off. As I learned this week talking to some colleagues, old can be new when even long-time users discover functionality they never knew existed. That is the subject of this and next week's posts.
Designing in any graphical software involves a lot of selection of objects. Any time you want to move an object, change an object's properties, or just query, you first start with selecting it. Ultiboard supports the basic Windows selection techniques. The main ones are
- Left click+drag to select a group of objects (or press Ctrl to deselect from a selected group)
- Ctrl+click to add or remove individual objects
Designs in Ultiboard can become vertically dense, particularly on multi-layer designs, where parts, traces, copper area, vias, etc, start to overlap. These basic Windows selection are not sufficient becuase as the design becomes denser because there are multiple objects at the same point, and it can be difficult to pick one object as opposed to another. Ultiboard has a few additional well known ways to help with selection: the selection filters and layer visibility.
The selection filters on the Select toolbar is usually my first friend when I'm having difficulty selecting a particular object.
These filters determine which types of objects you can select, and more importantly which objects are ignored for selection. Typically you need to move entire parts, but don't need to modify the associated holes or pads, and so turning off selection of pads and SMD pads (the 5th and 6th items) can really help you to pick the right object. On a related note, I think it was version 10.1.1 that I removed snapping of the cursor to these pads except when placing traces, which really helps in picking the right object!
The second friend I often turn to is changing layer visibility on the Layers tab in the Design Toolbox.
With this, you can turn off or just gray out the visibility of entire layers, and along with it the ability to select objects on that layer.
The last thing I often use is to turn off the visibility of copper areas. (The Show copper areas option which you can control in the Global Preferences > PCB Design tab.) This is often helpful because copper areas such as power planes often occupy large areas of the PCB, and they have a habit of wanting to be selected. Unchecking this option hides them and prevents them from being selected - you just have to remember that it is still there.
So that is three ways to help with selecting objects, but I can think of a few more, lesser known but powerful ways to help with selection. One of these is the one that a long-time users recently discovered, but for that you'll have to wait until next week.
