Simple Copy Room Format with rotation - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Electr0nicus
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2023, 12:04:39 pm
content: HiI have a annoying problem with a multi-channel design in Altium, and there especially with the "Copy Room Formats" command.It seems, that this command does not take into account, that the room can be rotated, and always copies exactly what is in the source room to the destination room, nevertheless if the destination-room is rotatet or not.I have made a coarse layout of each room of the project, and than arranged all the rooms in a fashion that will accomodate the desired form-factor of the finished product. In doing so i also rotated some of the multi-channel rooms, thinking, that the copy room command will take care of it. To my unpleasant surprise it prosumably doesn't do that and all the channel-rooms which are rotated from the original room get completly messed up, because the contents of the source room are pasted into it without considering the rotation.Is there some trick wo make altium do what i need, or is that function of copying room formats just another function, which sounds good on the marketing sheet, but isn't really thought trough, like so often in Altium unfortunately.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2023, 12:22:09 pm
content: I agree this is an issue, and I only have a workaround for it. Rooms don't have orientation, and that is what is causing it.You can place the rooms somewhere outside the PCB outline, make them the same size. Then copy the room format for the mirrored parts.Then you want to drag the room to it's final place. Also Edit->move->rotate could help.This is like putting lipstick on a pig, but I don't think there is a better way to do it.

author: Electr0nicus
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2023, 12:36:52 pm
content: Thanks tszabooI was hoping that there is a more elegant way and not the way, as you said, to "put lipstick on a pig", but so be it. I can't do without a multi-channel schematic/layout in this case because it's so repetitive, as you already can see from the screenshots. And thats only 30% of the whole PCB, which is equally repetitive

author: ajb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 07, 2023, 04:15:39 pm
content: tszaboo's suggested workaround is one option. Sometimes laying out only one room and then copying just the outline to the others helps--you can even delete the components and routing from the other rooms, using them to just reserve space on the board, and then add them back in towards the end.Alternatively, you could layout one of the 0° rooms and one of the 180° rooms then just copy from each to the other rooms in the same orientation. You can split the two orientations into separate Design Channel Classes to make that easier. Design > Classes, scroll down in the tree on the left to the "Design Channel Classes" section, and you should find a class listed there for the multichannel sheet, with all of the instances listed as members. Remove the 180° instances from that class and put them in a new Design Channel Class. From there, you should be able to copy layout between rooms of the same orientation only. You'll need to transfer changes between the two orientations manually, but you'll only have to do that once for each change, the rest is handled by the Design>Rooms>Copy as normal.