convert channels to independant schematics  - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: jano2358
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 10:50:43 am
content: Hi!In Altium 18, I have a design with hierarchical distribution (one master schematic and a few different kind of channels), the PCB is already designed and everything is connected. Now I want to separate some of the channels of one kind to make independent modifications to them, update pcb etc. how I can create the independent schematics without breaking the connection of schematic-channel-pcb?

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 11:21:20 am
content: how drastic are the changes?Can you do them with the build variants feature?

author: jano2358
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 01:11:44 pm
content: changes required are not drastic (a few resistor values), there are 18 channels of one kind and each one of them will need different value in some resistorsnever used that feature (build variants), do you think it´s a good way to do it?

author: Fgrir
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 04:19:54 pm
content: This might be what you are looking for:https://www.altium.com/documentation/18.0/display/ADES/((Multi-Sheet+and+Multi-Channel+Design))_AD#!Multi-SheetandMulti-ChannelDesign-ParametricMulti-ChannelHierarchicalDesignEdit: fix URL

author: ajb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 12, 2018, 07:37:06 pm
content: The sheet parameters thing is a neat idea, but directly changing the value of a component is kind of gross. Half of the point of using a tool like Altium is to maintain consistency from the library, through the design, and into your manufacturing/documentation outputs, and changing the component value locally instead of selecting a different part from the library breaks that process. It's also a fairly hidden way of making the component change, and could easily cause problems if someone who doesn't know it's there edits the schematic later on.The best solution is probably to use assembly variants. You can define a single 'standard' variant as and then once the design is compiled, open the sheet in question, and at the bottom you'll see a tab for each of the instances of the sheet in the project. You can easily select which instance you want to edit, then right click a part -> Variants -> set the alternate part for the Variant. You will need to make sure that the new variant is selected for all of your outputs! Otherwise everything will show up as whatever non-variant default is.

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 13, 2018, 01:10:52 am
content: Quote from: jano2358 on June 12, 2018, 01:11:44 pmI've used build variants in the past, where I had one design (sub-G ISM radio) and needed to make the filters match 915 and 868 for two different builds for different regions of the world.. It works really well... you basically go to the component in the build variant system (you get a tab on the schematic for each instance of the circuit in the design!) and adjust part parameters of each part manually to suit what you need each version of it to be.... you can adjust the description and manufacturer and mpn and supplier info... that new info lives in the project file, and is applied over the particular varying parts on a particular sheet instance whenever you look at the design in its "compiled" form. (and extract BOM, etc)More recently I've gotten a lot stricter with my library usage, and only really place parts from a database.... And since then, I have only needed to use build variants for "NP-ing" parts in my more recent designs.Funnily enough right now I am doing a job where there are going to be two build versions of a PCBA with different filter part values for different RF frequency support, so tossing up for myself whether or not I still want to do it how I did it before.... I am kind of hoping that there's a way to stomp a database part over the top of another database part as a variant, rather than doing the build variant info field by field.. haven't got to trying it yet, though.