Welcome to the CADSTARguys Blog - Information, hints, tips and my waffle on the CADSTAR Printed Circuit Board design suite.

Please note that all names used are completely fictitious and any thing written is my own personal opinion or knowledge and not related in any way to either my employers or their customers (or Zuken).
Also this is not a replacement for proper Maintenence/support and you should read the help files before asking anything techy:).

Monday 4 July 2011

Recycling your old electronic components or IT equipment?

With current environmental legislation preventing a lot of simple throwing away of old electronic components and equipment it can often be costly to dispose of, requiring licensed waste disposal contractors and so on.

However, if the components or equipment is still in a perfectly usable condition - for example an old slow laptop/pc/monitor - or perhaps you have found some non ROSH components at the back of the stores. There are still people that will reuse these without costing you a penny.

How?

Sunday 3 July 2011

Further neat tricks for using the signal reference zone links.

Now that you are using signal references and the zone links - are you finding yourself restricted because they do not appear on other items such as Block Terminals, Bus Terminals etc.

However we are still able to use them by creating a signal reference that has no symbol - so it can be placed on the same net and terminal of any other item.

Wednesday 18 May 2011

Importing a sheet border via DXF from another system.

Someone asked on one of the web forums how to import his sheet borders in from another piece of software where they have been saved as a DXF.

I'll type a response here...

Monday 16 May 2011

Further improving your schematic templates.

If you have followed the posts on setting up a schematic template to use documentation symbols and zone links there are a few other things that can be done to further improve them.

You may have noticed a little selection box when starting a new design entitled
"View New Design Settings".
By selecting this you will get an intermediate configuration box before your new schematic opens where you can configure initial settings for the schematic such as the units, grid step and style, colour scheme etc.

Tuesday 10 May 2011

Now its time to actually use the zone hyperlinks.

Now that you have a schematic template prepared, we can start creating a massive schematic over many sheets with oodles of links in them, where by viewing or clicking on the links you can easily find where it goes. I can remember having to draw all over my schematics - marking up what sheet I can find the other end of linked signals - thankfully no more.

Sunday 8 May 2011

Preparing a schematic template with zone link support.

Now that we have documentation symbols (See here) we can start to use them, however in order to not have to setup the symbols & the zones for every schematic we should make a schematic template so that it is setup for each new schematic.

Friday 6 May 2011

Creating a zoned document symbol set.

When adding a border to your designs, in order to not be redrawing it every design it should be created as a document symbol. This can be added to both Schematic or PCB designs and easily scaled to fit around the design so it can fit another paper size. Let me explain how to make one that you can use for your drawings.

Wednesday 4 May 2011

Using zoned drawings and signal reference hyperlinks

One of the little known features to come into CADSTAR in recent versions is the ability to identify from a pair of signal reference symbols where the each corresponding reference is.

Although only a small thing, this does make it a lot easier to work with diagrams that have lots of signal references shooting off to various parts of other sheets in your drawing set.

Prior to this we would have to put text to identify where you can find the other part of the signal, well now
we have a link that you can click on and it will take the screen to centre in on the other part of the signal.

Its been a busy few months.

I have been a bit busy of late, things I wanted to blog about I have held off because of a few technical issues I did not feel I should post.

Hopefully the next few days posts should make up for those.

Wednesday 9 February 2011

How High?

Depending upon what external applications you use with CADSTAR, your heights
may end up being all setup wrongly.

Monday 10 January 2011

Why do I need a drill drawing?

A question I often get asked when I mention drill drawings is "why bother when the drill sizes are in the NC data" they say.