What's Good About Capture Locking Objects? The Secret's in the SPB16.3 Release!

The Allegro Design Entry CIS (Capture - Allegro flow) now includes an object locking feature. This feature allows you to temporarily lock and object on your schematic or board while you are cross-probing. This will help to avoid shifting (with the potential of breaking connectivity) a component on the schematic or board during the cross-probe operation.

When you cross probe between Capture and Allegro PCB Editor, you need to keep selecting components in your design to place them on your board. In many cases, you’re constructing an elaborate design with a large number of components and intricate connectivity. So when you keep selecting the components and nets on your design, you might inadvertently shift a component. This shift, in some cases, might even cause issues of connectivity. To avoid shifting a component during the cross-probe operation, you can temporarily lock the component. This ensures that the component is locked to the canvas and cannot be moved.

Read on for more details …

To lock a component
1. Press and hold down the Shift + Ctrl key combination.
2. Left-click on the component. To lock multiple components, perform these steps continuously on multiple components. The component is selected by the left-click operation, but it is also locked (by the Shift + Ctrl key combination) so you cannot move the component. Now if you left-click the component it remains selected.

 
To unlock a component
Left-click anywhere on the schematic page or on another component.
 

As always, please let me know how you're utilizing this new capability.

Jerry "GenPart" Grzenia