Can you overlap rooms?

[audi95]

Hi, I am new to Altium and I started a project using hierarchical design, so I have rooms for each sheet symbol and I have nested sheet symbols too. If I try to put one room on top another sometimes when I move the room on top, traces stick to the room below, messing everything up.

Do rooms have to be completely non overlapping for things not to go wrong?

Thanks so much!

[ajb]

In my experience, yes, it is much better if the rooms do not overlap.  Rooms tend to ride the knife edge between 'useful but annoying' and 'too much trouble to bother'.  I suppose if your projects tend to always wind up with functional units cleanly isolated from one another on the board they could be a lot more useful (driving rules for instance) and less annoying, but that's not the sort of board I design as a rule.  It is nice to be able to copy a room layout from one channel to another, though--when that works, anyway. . .

EDIT: Also, it's not immediately obvious because it's not consistent with anything else in the PCB UI, but you can edit the room shape so that it's not a rectangle (Right Click > Room Actions > Edit Polygonal Room Vertices) which can help keep rooms from overlapping.

[audi95]

That clears up a lot, thank you! I have a multichannel design which is why I was so keen to use rooms. I will definitely edit the room shape, seems like the way to go.

Is it okay to have some components outside a room generated from a hierarchical design?

I have a power led in one room that I want on a completely different area of the PCB.

[T3sl4co1l]

Not a problem, but it depends.

Mind that a room will drag around whatever's inside it, so if you're still moving rooms around a lot, and there is routing present, the traces in the shared area will probably get torn in different directions and you'll have to remember to patch them up.

Preferred is to wait until placement looks really good, then lock the rooms down (and most of the components, probably) and begin routing.  Don't have to worry about rooms dragging everything out of whack, if you never drag them...

If you're not at expert level with regards to component placement, you'll want to do some back-and-forth, laying out local areas and shoving components as needed.  Don't be afraid to rip up routing -- chances are you'll re-lay it in half the time the first round took, so it's not a huge cost in the grand scheme of things.  (A bit Sisyphean, true...)

Remember to leave plenty of room, don't try to over-optimize a minuscule board.  That way lies madness (not even exponentially, but hyperbolically increasing effort!).

Is it okay to have some components outside a room generated from a hierarchical design?

I have a power led in one room that I want on a completely different area of the PCB.

DRC will flag this as a room containment violation.  Pedantically, you should put it on another sheet, I suppose.

Tim