Duplicating part of a layout

[bradholland]

I am creating a board with 8 x the same circuit repeated. (voices of a synthsizer)
Is there a way of laying out 1 of these circuits and then having all the others follow the same layout without having to arrange each component of every circuit?
Hope that question makes sense?

[PCB_Wiz]

Maybe this thread will help ? - has a number of script type solutions, including a quite recent one.

Easy way to lay out a repeated circuit?

Hi everyone, Suppose you had a schematic that contained the same amplifier circuit, repeated ten times. Is there any way to avoid having to re-layout the same circuit ten times? Is there any way to lay it out just once, and copy it for the other nine circuits? I have a big schematic with a number of repeated features. I really don’t want to have to re-layout all these features hope there is a solution… thanks!

Such tools usually expect a simple exact stepped XY array, which your layout rough does not quite meet.
They might be able to be bent/modified to draw from an offset table, where simple regular repeat is not present.

[ArtG]

If only array tool in PCBNew worked properly, it would’ve been a piece of cake! You need ability to increment component reference index automatically (i.e. R1 to become R1_1, R1_2, R1_3 etc.). Currently, it can get you half way. You can do your layout on a single circuit. Delete the rest of the parts. Then you can select your entire circuit and run create array with however many instances you need. The next part is where the tedious manual labor comes in. You would need to go through every part and change the references to match your schematic (array tool will just duplicate…or replicate references). I suppose, if you use Ctrl-F and change one component at a time, it would make it faster. It is still a lot of work, but may be faster than trying to create a bunch of identical layouts. At the end you would need to rebuild your netlist using the reference option.