hello,
i’ve seen that in the following commit the multichannel tool has been marked as completed; this feature i think it should incorporate in the kc source base the functionality of the ‘replicate layout’ plugin.
Does anyone have already tried it and have some suggestion on where where it can be found? i’d like to test it myself since lot of my work is done using the plugin and i would like to compare the capabilities of the two methods.
I would recommend waiting until closer to V9 release (maybe the first release candidate). But if you want to try it early, there is a new demo project, multichannel_mixer, that you can look at. There is no documentation for this feature yet, so if you start now, you will have to piece it together looking at the demo project and the source code.
Indeed, there’s no official manual, so here’s a quick instruction:
Draw your schematic, with the repeatable blocks as instances of a subsheet. Alternatively you can mark identical portions of your schematic with schematic rule areas and assign a component class to each.
Update the PCB
Go to Tools->Multichannel->Generate Placement Rule Areas, select the sheet instances you want the RAs for to be automatically made.
You can also make the RAs manually (just draw an RA, set its type to Placement and assign a sheet instance or component class to it in the RA properties dialog)
For the moment cloning planes and free silkscreen text is not supported, I’ll try to implement it if time permits (push and shove stuff is taking quite a lot of my time…).
For all users starting to play with the multichannel tool I have some remarks to step 4) of the description:
If you draw your own Placement Rule areas you should:
set the layer-checkboxes on all copper-layers of your design
disable all checkboxes from the “keepout” panel (otherwise you will not be able to place footprints and route to the footprints inside the rule areas)
give the rule areas a name (preferably the name of the corresponding subsheet) → this makes it easier later in the “repeat layout” dialog
if your placement area shows a complicated shape: draw only the first Rule Area with this complicated shape. Either copy the other RA (and change the subsheet-pulldown-menu - see üicture 2) or draw a simple triangle/rectangle as a shape. The “Repeat Layout” command will copy the exact shape from the original to all other Rule areas.