Altium rooms broken??

[axemaster]

I have encountered a bizarre situation in a multi-channel design. Whenever I drag a room around, none of the components move with it. It's as if they didn't belong to the room at all. However, if I tell the room to do "orthogonal fit" around the components, it correctly wraps around the components.

I have also discovered that trying to copy room formats is failing, again it seems not to recognize the components inside the room.

Has anyone encountered something like this?

[axemaster]

OK I think I just figured it out. Apparently all of the rooms were disabled in the design rules.

I have no idea how this happened, I certainly didn't do it. Grrrrrr...

[anovickis]

theres quite a few bugs with rooms like this - usually if you are dragging the room outside the PCB area especially if it contains only components it seems to work better .  Once any routes are in all bets are off even on room format copy working correctly

[TSR]

Sorry to post here, it's not exactly 'on thread' ... but it's close.

Altium has some really annoying bugs, but I just figured out how to fix one of them related to rooms in multi-channel designs.

The BUG: Your source room is the picture of perfection. And you do a 'Copy Room Format'. The destination room looks fine until you check on the parts and find that they are off-grid. Not by a lot, not anything you can see, but instead of being on (458, 256) the part is on (457.998, 255.978) for example. If you select the part and move it by hand it will snap to grid, but that's a pain if you have a lot of parts. If you do a Align->Align to Grid Altium will truncate the number (rather than round it to the nearest integer) and so the part will end up at (457, 255) - 1 mill off in both directions. Do not do Align->Align to Grid!

The FIX: The problem is with the 3D bodies of the parts. It seems like Altium is aligning parts based on their 3D bodies rather than their pads. So, find the parts that are slightly misaligned, go into the Footprint editor and show their 3D bodies (in 2D mode). Turn on the electrical grid (Shift+E) and hover over the corners of your 3D model. Mark down their locations to 3 digits and you will find that the 3D body is ever so slightly off center. Get out your calculator, find the difference (to the thousandth of a mil - who knew those sweethearts at Altium cared about micro-inches), and move your 3D body (using 'Mover Selection by X,Y...') so that it's dead nuts on center. Save the part in the library. Then, taking your life in your hands, do a Tools->Update from PCB Libraries... and update only the 3D bodies you changed. Now do the Copy Room Format again and ... BINGO! the problem parts are now aligned on gird!

One down ... and only 3,654,564,324 Altium bugs to go!