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Introduction
Installation of Auto Designator
Licensing of Auto Designator
How to use Auto Designator
FAQ
Introduction
Relocation of components' designators is a tedious job which also take long time, but it is a must to do job in PCB design flow. With Auto Designator, it becomes a easy and quick job.
Auto Designator automatically adjust the position and orientation of components' reference designators on board.
It has two working modes:
1. As a standalone application: User could invoke it as
a standalone application, and read in PCB file in ASCII
format, performs placement of designators, then generates
the new PCB file with designator placed.
2. As an Altium script: If you are using Altium DXP,
Altium DXP 2004 or Altium Designer 6, you may invoke an
Auto Designator script in PCB editor, then Auto Designator
will automatically process the PCB data in current PCB
editor window and modify the location and orientation of
the components designators for you.
The designator placement also have two placement modes:
1. Place for silkscreen. In this mode, the designator
is placed beside of the component body. Its orientation is
limited to 2 possible orientations, horizontal or 90
degree.
2. Place for assembly. In this mode, the designator is
placed inside the component body. Its orientation is also
limited to 2 possible orientation, horizontal or 90
degree.
* Protel, Altium DXP and Altium Designer are trademarks of Altium Limited.
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Installation of Auto Designator
Auto Designator is an application that published on web and free to download. It is a single exe file (setupAD.exe). It must be installed on a PC running Microsoft Windows operation system. It has been tested on Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.
Because it is developed on MS Visual C++ 2008, it requires VC++ 2008 run time library to work. The installation package also contains VC++ 2008 run time library. First time installation, make sure to select "Full" installation when prompted to select installation packages.
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Licensing of Auto Designator
Auto Designator requires a valid trial license or a formal license to run. The license could be obtained on the web http://www.konkad.com/register.shtml. The license key is normally delivered to customer through email.
After the license information has been received, it could be entered with the following procedure:
1) Install Auto Designator, then run it in Windows Start menu.
2) In Auto Designator application window, Use menu "Help/Check License".
3)When the license dialog appears, enter your license key and your registration information.
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How to use Auto Designator
• Use Auto Designator as Standalone Application
1) Generate PCB file in ASCII format from Protel 99SE or from Altium
DXP/Designer.
For details on how to generate PCB in ASCII format, click Protel 99SE or Altium DXP/Designer.
2) Start Auto Designator application in Windows start menu.
3) To place the designator for
PCB fabrication, use menu "Place for silkscreen". To create assembly drawing, use menu "Place for assembly".
4) The Select PCB file dialog will be displayed. You may click "Browse" button to select the input PCB file and select the output PCB file name.
You may also adjust the clearance parameter when you are in "Place for Silkscreen" mode and want to change the default clearance of 10 mil for designators to other silkscreen objects and pads.
5) Click "OK" button to process the PCB file.
Auto Designator will display processing information while processing the data. After the PCB file has been processed, it will generate a new PCB file which has all place-able designators placed well. Some of the designators may not be placed well due to insufficient space available on board or abnormal board outline and/or component shape.
Note: When in "place for silkscreen" mode, only the visible designators are processed. All hidden designators (either the Hidden attribute is enabled or the designator is on a layer other than Overlay layer) are not modified. When in "place for assembly" mode, the font of designator may be shrunk to fit into the component's body outline.
6) When finished, the new PCB file will be created in the same folder as the original PCB file with different file names.
If you place it for silkscreen, the new file name will be "xxx_SilkScreen.xxx".
If you place it for assembly drawing, the new file name will be "xxx_Assembly.xxx".
The "xxx" are the characters in original PCB name.
7) Now you may import the new generated PCB file back into the PCB editor for a review or further operations.
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• Use Auto Designator in Altium PCB Editor Windows
If you are using Altium DXP/DXP2004/Designer 6, you may invoke the Auto Designator directly inside the PCB editor.
1) Open the Auto designator project file ( "AutoDesignator.PRJSCR" ) in Altium DXP or Altium Designer.
2) Open the PCB you are working on in PCB editor.
3) In PCB editor window, use menu "DXP/Run script ...", then in the Script dialog,select Auto Designator Script and click "OK" to run.
4) The script will firstly check the software license condition. If it cannot find a valid license it will prompt you to add a new license key. If it find a valid license, it will pop out the Auto Designator dialog.
5) Select "Place for SilkScreen" or "Place for Assembly" per your requirement and click "Start". The script will export the PCB information into Auto Designator, wait for Auto Designator perform the placement job, and adjust the positions of designators on board.
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FAQ
Q. What's the system requirement for this tool?
A. Auto Designator must be installed on Windows based PC. The memory requirement depends on how big the PCB file you process. The more memory your PC has, the bigger PCB file it could handle. We recommend a minimum of 256MB memory in the system.
Q. What's the difference between trial mode and normal mode of Auto Designator?
A. When Auto Designator detected that the user is using a valid trial license, it will work in trial mode. If the license is a formal license, it will work in normal mode.
In trial mode, Auto Designator is full functional only when it works on a PCB with less than 100 components totally. If the PCB contains more than 100 components, it will only process the components' designators on Top side.
In normal mode, Auto Designator works on both sides of the board, no matter how many components are there on board.
Q. How does the tool recognize board outline?
A. We recognize the board outline by the graphic elements on Mechanical Layer 1. So, if your board's outline is defined on other layer, the tool may not be able to recognize it and it may not generate a correct output.
Q. Why sometimes are there several designators placed off-board?
A. This tool could recognize well the board outline of rectangle PCB board. Sometimes, PCB designers add a lot of shapes to board outline, such as breakaways, If the board is not a simple rectangular shape, this tool may not recognize it correctly, and thus the components at the edge of PCB may have their designators placed off-board.
Q. Why does the Altium script dialog seem frozen after I click "Start" button?
A. This is caused by the current working mechanism of Altium's script engine. We could not do anything to improve it, unless Altium improves their script engine. However, you could tell whether the script is truely frozen by watching the progress bars and the status bar. If the progress bar or status bar is changing, the script is still running. If the progress bar and status bar both look frozen for long time, and it stops response to mouse and keyboard, it is truely frozen.
Q. How can I get help or report bugs of this software?
A. You may email bug report to email: report@konkad.com. You may visit our web site http://www.konkad.com frequently to get new patches or upgrades. You may also find some useful information in our user forum on our web site.
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