Board Level Annotation - What on earth does it do ?

[snoopy]

Greetings all,

I have an existing Multi channel board design which has been Re-annotated at the board level and the physical designators pushed back onto the schematic. OK no problems except that the original channel A,B,C,D suffixes have been removed and replaced with your normal flattened out designators ie R111,R112,R113 instead of R47A,R47B,R47C. OK so far so good. Everything matches between schematic and PCB.

Now the nightmare starts when I add new components to the schematic. If I use Annotate Schematics then it produces duplicate designators when I compile the schematic so makes it useless now. If I use Board Level Annotation the C? and R?'s don't change at all. So how on earth are you supposed to add components to a design ? What do you use Board Level annotation for anyway ? Seems to do nothing for me.

Note that when I first did the schematic I could always correctly annotate the schematic no matter how many extra components I added. The problems start when you re-annotate at the PCB level and push back to the schematic. It has something to do with using multi channels and flattening out the designators.

This is a real show stopper for me. The only way around it is to look at the designators on the pcb and then edit the schematic so the new schematic designators don't clash with the pcb. What a PTA 

cheers.

[tszaboo]

1st, make sure your component links are OK.
Follow this guide:
https://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADRR/WorkspaceManager_Dlg-ComfirmCompMatchesForm((Edit+Component+Links))_AD
Board level annotate is to rename eg. R12_AnalogLeft_Ch1 to R124.

[snoopy]

1st, make sure your component links are OK.
Follow this guide:
https://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADRR/WorkspaceManager_Dlg-ComfirmCompMatchesForm((Edit+Component+Links))_AD
Board level annotate is to rename eg. R12_AnalogLeft_Ch1 to R124.

That seems to be all OK. The problem is adding new components to an existing schematic.

A brute force way I have done it is to send the components across un-annotated and then re-annotate the pcb and update the schematic with the new annotated pcb components. But that means that all of the components on the pcb are re-annotated each time whether I like it or not.

There's got to be an easier way. This is ridiculous

cheers

[tszaboo]

This is how I do it, it seems to work 95% of the time. Only issues when I move a sub-sheet or something architecture changes (bad planning).

Place component on SCH.
Annotate schematic.
Update PCB.
Check links.

[snoopy]

This is how I do it, it seems to work 95% of the time. Only issues when I move a sub-sheet or something architecture changes (bad planning).

Place component on SCH.
Annotate schematic.
Update PCB.
Check links.

Yes for a normal design it works.

Once you do a multi-channel design then as soon as you reannotate on the pcb and push back to the schematic you can never annotate properly if you add more components. I must have tried a 100 different techniques to see if I could do it and each time it failed to work properly. In the end I just looked at the pcb and worked out the highest designator on the board for each component class and then manually redesignated on the schematic one by one !! That is the only it works now

My advice to anyone doing a multi-channel design is DO NOT reannotate the pcb until the board is finalized !!

cheers

[aandrew]

This is still an issue in 2019, 3 years after the initial question. Exact same issue in fact.

Once you have a multi-channel design reannotated, you cannot seem to add/edit the design without a *lot* of pain.

Professional software my arse...