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Sharing OrCAD Designs

JM20241029170

Howdy,

My small team has OrCAD 17.4 without CIS (too expensive) and we have many git-tracked orCAD projects and several orCAD libraries holding all our parts that are shared on all of the projects. Up until now, all our design work has been on a single computer and user account, but now we have added more designers who need to be able to pull the projects and libraries down and edit them.

The problem I'm running into is that when a designer on another computer pulls down the project and attempts to update the cache so that the libraries match by using Design->Update Cache, OrCAD errors out since the libraries are not at the same absolute path. Even when we move our libraries to a core folder of Windows, we still have to select many of the parts individually inside the cache since OrCAD crashes if you "update cache" of something like "GND". This is impractical since we have 100s of parts in each design.

I would like to be able to store the libraries in a relative path and be able to update all of the design cache at once. Do y'all have any ideas?

I'm highly experienced in Altium and KiCAD and each of these has an equivalent to "Update design from Library" and "Update library path", which works very nicely to do these actions and allow simple git management.

  • +1

    OrCAD only works with absolute paths. Your best free option is to share the folder where your libraries are and have everyone work on the network share (you can do this from a normal computer, you don't need a 'server'. I would also map the network share to a drive and use the mapped drive as your library source. This will also allow your designers to update symbols and footprints from a central source so you're not copying files back and forth between machines.

    OrCAD has a utility to replace the paths in your library with a new one as a batch operation so you don't need to do it one at a time. It works as a one path to another, so if you have multiple paths in your design cache, you'll need to run the utility once for each path. The path change stays with the project though, so every time a different designer opens the project they'd have to do this. It's much better to make sure everyone is using the same absolute path in their work. You don't have to use a "core folder", it can be as simple as C:\CadenceLibraries.

  • 0

    Ugh.  Not using CIS?   I'm inclined to copy the latest OLB files to whatever unfortunate path/filename the project is contaminated with. 

    Update all symbols.   

    To state the obvious, If you don't deploy and enforce a common library path across your users, that mess never goes away.

    Mac users manage to store their OLB files on a Y: drive with everything else on C:\. 

    Don't ask.

  • 0 in reply to Eric Jordan

    Thank y'all for the guidance, really helped me get moving.

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