PCB Design Blogs

Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could customize viewing and access your PCB design environment? You might want to lock the toolbars to prevent the accidental movement of objects or set up design libraries when creating designs. Personalizing the settings of your design environment provides ease of use while working with a PCB design application.

Allegro® PCB Editor enables you to customize preferences that control various aspects of the application according to the individual or organizational requirements. Configuring preferences provide you quick access to frequently used commands. Allegro PCB Editor preserves these settings for the current user for all subsequent sessions. This helps you save time when performing design tasks within your PCB design application.

This blog is intended to help you make the best use of Allegro PCB Editor by setting up user preferences. Keep reading to learn more about it.

Familiarizing with User Preferences Editor

You can set user preferences in Allegro PCB Editor in the User Preferences Editor dialog box.

→ To launch this dialog box, choose User Preferences from the Setup menu or run enved in the Command window.

In this dialog, you can set user preferences for various categories, such as Display, Drawing, Placement, and so on. The User Preference Editor UI is divided into three sections, Categories, Category Type, and Summary description. Let’s look at each of these in detail.

Categories

In User Preferences Editor, environment variables are grouped in easy-to-browse categories. You can expand any folder (category) from the Categories section and find the variables that belong to the category. 

Not sure which category a variable belongs to? Just search for the variable name in the Search for preference field. To extend the search within the descriptions, select the Include summary in search checkbox.

Category Type

This section is divided into four columns – Preference, Value, Effective, and Favorite.

• Preference: A list of environment variables related to the selected category. For example, the Cursor category includes the following environment variables, pcb_cursor, pcb_cursor_angle, and pcb_cursor_color.
• Value: Specify the value of preferences. Some preferences include a drop-down menu with a list of values. For example, in the Cursor sub-category, the following values are available for pcb_cursor, cross, infinite, and octal.

• Effective: Indicates when the change in preferences variables takes effect. The three states of action are as follows:
  • Command: Takes effect on the subsequent run of the command related to the preference
  • Immediate: Takes effect as soon as you click OK in the User Preferences Editor dialog box
  • Restart: Takes effect after restarting Allegro PCB Editor
• Favorite: Lets you bookmark frequently-used preferences by selecting the Favorite checkbox. These preferences are saved under the My Favorites category for quick access

Summary Description

At the bottom of the User Preferences Editor dialog box, you can view a brief description of each category and user preference including default and valid range of values, and examples. Hover the cursor over a preference name in the Category Type section to display its description. It is a good practice to view the description before editing the value of a preference as the valid values may vary from release to release.

• Info: View a list of all the user preferences along with their descriptions in a text file. You can save this file for future reference.
• List All: View a list of all the user preferences along with their default values in a text file.

Setting Up User Preferences

Now let’s see how to change a user preference setting.

To change the cursor type to infinity, follow these steps:

1. Expand the Display category and select the Cursor
2. Click the drop-down arrow for pcb_cursor in the Value column and choose infinite.
3. Click OK to apply the new value.

That’s it!

Notice that this setting is effective immediately and the cursor has changed from the default crosshair cursor to infinite. In subsequent sessions, the infinite cursor will be used as the default cursor.

Similarly, you can customize other settings while designing a PCB. User Preferences Editor saves your time and provides you the ease to access and modify user settings.

To learn in detail about User Preferences, watch Setting User Preferences within the Allegro PCB Editor - v17.4-2019 training byte on the Cadence Support portal. Click the training byte link now or visit Cadence Support and search for this training byte under Video Library.

If you find the post useful and want to delve deeper into training details, enroll in the following online training course for lab instructions and a downloadable design:           
Allegro PCB Editor Basic Techniques v17.4-2019QIR2 (Online)                                                                
You can become Cadence Certified once you complete the course.          

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