What's Good About Allegro PCB Editor Symbol Editor? 16.6 Has a Couple of New Enhancements!

The Allegro PCB Editor release has a few new capabilities related to symbol pins.

The Symbol Editor has been enhanced with a new utility designed to automatically renumber pins based on positional qualifiers. The path to the utility is ‘Layout – Renumber Pins’.  Open an existing footprint file. Once in the symbol editor, go to Layout – Renumber Pins. Experiment with different renumbering options. Perhaps delete rows and columns of pins with the intent of creating a smaller symbol. Experiment with other .dra files you may have on hand:

   
The Symbol Editor now supports both exporting and importing of pin-based .CSV files. The format of the file supports <pin number, padstack name, x position, y position, rotation, text offset x, text offset y, text rotate, mirror>.

Open a .new csv using Excel (see the figure below for an example). We are looking to build a new symbol with the pin pitch of the x coordinated shifted by 50 mils. Replace ‘X’ values: -150 with 200; -150 with -200. Save the file:
             

Invoke the Symbol Editor then open a .dra Go to File – Import – CSV Pin File. Enable ‘Delete existing pins’. Click ‘Import’:

   
Please share your experiences using these new features.
Jerry “GenPart” Grzenia