Interactive routing

[temperance]

Hi,

I'm experiencing some troubles with the interactive routing tools in AD.

1. You can create a rule on how SMD PAD's are being entered. (Design Rules>SMT>SMD Entry) This works for a new trace being routed. However, this rule is ignored for traces which are being pushed while routing. Troublesome because it generates a lot of DRC's.

2. The rule SMT (SMD) rule is also ignored when dragging traces.

3. AD19 has this new feature to automatically re-route traces when a component is being moved. Also in this case the SMT rule is ignored.

Can someone enlighten me on how to force AD to follow the rules?

4. When traces are being pushed, and you change your mind, the pushed traces don't return to this original position if they are being pushed beyond some "imaginary" boundary.
Can one force AD to move traces back into their original position?


Regards, Temperance

[T3sl4co1l]

Welcome to the incoherent side of Altium?...

I would guess these rules are more informational (i.e., run a batch DRC check to find cases), and for autorouting.

You could always use route for changing traces, never dragging them.  I guess this is the PADS way, and some people are simply used to that.  (Bothers the hell out of me though.. and probably you too?)

Personally, I don't worry about SMD entry, and there are other constraints that matter IRL but which Altium doesn't have rules for (in particular, thermal balance / spokes for small chips), so I do it by inspection anyway.

Tim

[ajb]

They say it's a poor carpenter who blames his tools, but IME when something isn't working in Altium it's 50/50 whether it's user error or a software 'limitation'.  There are a number of issues with interactive routing, so in this case it's probably not anything you're doing wrong.  The propensity for 'helpful' features like pushing tracks and dragging components to fuck things up is well known. 

Is the pad entry rule new?  I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they added a rule and just neglected to make sure that all of the routing functions respect it.

[temperance]

I have no idea if this "pad entry rule" is new. The best solution is to not use this "feature" for now.