RatsNest Control in Allegro how to make it more usable ?

I know about this one as I keep fumbling my macro buttons on my mouse and setting the "Display only ratsnest of selected Component" feature by accident (basically no ratsnest are visible when no parts are selected.)

Must be in Placement Edit mode>  

I know about this one as I keep fumbling my macro buttons on my mouse and setting the "Display only ratsnest of selected Component" feature by accident (basically no ratsnest are visible when no parts are selected.)

Must be in Placement Edit mode>  

Well you can select pins & enable the rat on a pin, It is not necessary to select whole symbols just to see rat lines.

To put things in perspective all I want do do is. Click a Pin the rat shows up. Click the pin again and the rat disappears or do a window select. The mechanics of how this operation is done in Allegro is very tiresome to use in particular if you are dealing with many components that contain alot of rats nest. I took a look at the skill api and doing rat operations is included so I am thinking having a skill routine is plausible to handle this operation. Skill is not my forte though

If you have access to Specctra try it in that and you will see how easy & fluid rat control is, way way better than Allegro by along shot.

Thanks.

Just a little follow up on this, so I came up with a method to do what I wanted. The cool part about allegro is there are many ways to do things - Strokes to the rescue. What's interesting about allegro and nets is that when displaying the nets for "Diff Pairs" it treats the pins as two nets which is kind of add. Over on the Specctra side when one enables the net line or "Guides" as they are called in specctra both of the nets show up with one click on either pin if the net assignment is for a diff pair. That's kind of cool.

Thanks.

Hey excellon,

I was able to create strokes using commands in PCB editor but couldn't use them on design. Do you mind letting us know how to use strokes in PCB? By the way thanks for the solution. Had been waiting for this option for years.

I guess I'm partial to highlighting the interesting net but leaving other guides visible.  I use the multi-net routing function a lot to get close to the destination but have to go back and figure out if one net needs to go left or right of another net to minimize vias.   I think net highlight (which also affects the ratsnest) with shadow mode turned on to be fairly efficient.   But, then, we don't use FPGA's in our consumer-type designs.  

3122.Rats.zip

Hi AT

So you can use strokes to do lots of things and as you can see above they can be handy. So the thing is how to :), Well it's not to bad to configure things but first some background info.

On my system here I use a 3 Button Mouse and i'm sure most people are doing that too.

So by default allegro comes with a default strokes file. The strokes file resides in the pcbenv folder and it has a .strokes extension, Mine is called allegro.strokes. Typically that allegro strokes file is loaded by default when you start allegro.

The default strokes file comes with some pre-defined strokes. To see what they are "Im using 16.6" should be similar in 17x too. Go to > tools > utilities > Stroke Editor to launch the stroke editor. What you will see is basically a graphical representation for a command and that's the idea. In other words you would draw a stroke on the allegro canvas to execute a command associated with that stroke.

To invoke a stroke in allegro by default you have to hold down the control key and then use the right mouse button to draw the stroke on the screen. To try things out hold down the ctrl key and draw a Z with the right mouse button. The display should zoom in for you.

Now the action of holding down the control key can be changed so you don't have to do that to invoke a stroke. This will make things alot easier IMHO. Go to User Preferences then go to UI > Input and check the box "No_dragpopup". Exit out of the preferences editor.

Try that "Z" stroke again. Just draw a z on the canvas with the right mouse button and the display should zoom in. The trick is to dry draw your stroke to be as close as possible to what the stroke looks like. Play around after some practice you will get the idea.

The stroke editor is not really intuitive so play around to get the idea of how it works. Before making changes to the existing allegro.strokes file a good idea is to copy it to a usb drive or something so you have a backup. 

In the stroke editor you can also load other stroke files which is handy. Load my stroke file called rats.strokes in the stroke editor after unzipping the attachment "Use file open to do that" - File attached. Have a look at the strokes that I defined for the rats operation. Basically a L and a L drawn to the left. Save that rats.strokes file to you pcbenv directory. The reason for this is that allegro has to know where to look for the file.

Ok lastly try things out.

In allegro first load the rats.strokes file. In the allegro pcb editor command window type     strokefile rats.strokes    - Note the command syntax is   strokefile and then the strokefiles name.

Next try out the strokes on a board. A good test is to see how it works on a unratted board. You can turn off all rats first so as to remove the clutter then use the strokes to turn on or off at will.

Have fun...