I have designed multiple boards and changed the design rules to match those of the PCB manufacturer for one board. Now I try to import those settings to all other boards but the behaviour seems to be inconsistent.
If e.g. I change one parameter in the original board and save the pcb file and then import the settings from this board to another board again the parameter is not changed. But if I change a parameter in the destination board to another value it is changed back to some default or previous value if I execite the “import settings…”.
I have activated “Board layers…”, “Solder mask/…”, “Text & graphics default properties”, “Text & graphics formatting” and design “rule constraints” but I also tested with all features activated.
Probably a silly question, but did you place the correct path to the board, the settings from which you want to import, in the “Import From” Box at the top of the Import Settings window?
I selected the PCB file with the file selection tool so I think it should be correct. My first try was to import the settings from a collection of dummy projects for different manufacturers which I found on Github. But as some settings did not match the capabilities I could get from the PCB manufacturer I decided to manually check the setting for one design and then copy these settings to the other PCBs.
One possibility could be that the import functionality somehow uses only the first file I selected and ignores different files that are selected later as the values seem to be changed back to those from the first import. But as all the values are quite similar I’m not 100% sure.
I did a simple test and created 2 projects from scratch. For those projects I modified the settings and added “11111” or “33333” to all values for solder mask and constraints.
Then I took the pcb from the second project and importet all board settings from the first project.
Now most (!) solder mask parameters end in “11111” but the “Solder mask to copper clearance” is reset to 0. During a second test the “Solder mask expansion” which was correct after the first import kept this value even though the value in the first project was changed.
But all constraints are reset to their default values which are neither those of the first or the second project.
Is this a bug and should the constraints also be imported?
The “Solder mask to copper clearance” setting is probably new in v7 but the importer is older. I think this is just an oversight – whoever added the setting didn’t remember it should be added to the importer, too.