Connector pinout checking tool?

[shoepedals]

Lately I am often designing multi-panel PCBs that are connected via headers or other board to board connectors. It strikes me that it would be useful to set up some sort of relationship between pairs of connector parts so that, when drawing the schematic, there would be a flag if the pinout between the two does not match their net assignments. For example, if a pin is connected to ground on one side and a signal on the other, it would be helpful for the program to flag this. Similarly, if a net is connected to a pin on Connector A, it would be helpful if Connector B's corresponding pin also gets connected to that net and the PCB ERC could understand this and not try to route an airwire between them.

Is it possible to do something like this by setting up a special two-device part perhaps, and linking pins between them?

[jorge_garcia]

Hello @shoepedals ,

I hope this message finds you well. Multi-board workflows are on the roadmap, but it will still be some time before that work bears fruit. So for now we have workarounds. Are you designing both PCBs in a single file? Or do you have each PCB in it's own separate file?

In general it's better to have each board as it's own file. You generate a 3D PCB for each file and then you could bring those into an assembly and use silkscreen to confirm everything is connected as it should be. That's the best way I can think of to do it off the top of my head, however more details about what you are doing may reveal a better path.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,

[shoepedals]

Hi Jorge! 

Thanks for your reply. I actually was talking about this with other people in my field who do layout for musical devices (pedals, amps, and synth modules mostly) and we all very often do need to use multiple boards in our products in order to wither facilitate construction, make maintenance easier, fit in a tight space, or install modular components like a daughter board with a re-usable sub circuit. Everyone I talked to said they didn't have a great solution for a multi-board workflow, so I think this is definitely a good area to look into.

Personally, I do both individual daughter boards for some purposes (for example a board that houses externally-mounted controls or switches or I/O jacks), but also sometimes I do need to lay out, for example, a panelized PCB in one file so that I can work back and forth with the schematic in a reasonable workflow.

I think this is a big distinction in our field. Most of us are designing the circuit as well as the PCB and we view the schematic as really the primary source document and the PCB(s) as a physical implementation of the circuit. I think in other fields this is possibly the opposite.

For us, when we are working on these products, we are also engaging in an iterative prototyping and design process, so having a lot of different files to try and keep in synch is very prone to error and cumbersome for versioning.

What would really be ideal is if there were a way to designate different parts of the schematic as belonging to different boards in some succinct way so that, for example, if you have a board to board connectors that carries a net between boards, the schematic could designate which parts of a connector go on which board and also to define relative positioning of multiple connectors across boards to make sure they are always in alignment. There's also a common case in modular synth construction where you might want the exact same profile between two PCB outlines AND connector orientation that is relative to the board outlines consistently between them. If we had tools that could do something like this and move components/check nets between related groups of connectors that would make things a lot better for us in terms of workflow.

Perhaps a niche compared to other types of products but we do have a significant industry and I think a lot of the same tools would likely be useful for many other applications.

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @shoepedals ,

It's not niche and much needed. Thank you for the excellent insight into how you would like it to work. That type of feedback is super valuable.

I've added your comments to the existing ticket for investigating these workflows.

Best Regards,