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Create an assembly drawing - revised to create fab notes 11-9-11

engineer66219
Hello everyone, I am attempting to learn how to create assembly drawings from within pcb editor. I have searched the forums here and looked through the cadence software documents; however, I cannot find any information on how to create an assembly drawing. When I click on the assembly drawing command in pcb editor, I get an error stating variants.lst not found. Can someone explain how I can create an assembly drawing or please point me to some literature that will explain. Please keep in mind that I have no idea where to even start with this process, so please be as thorough as possible. Thank you,
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  • Hello,

    Manufacturing > Variants > Create Assembly Drawing is used in conjunction with the Variant Editor used by Allegro Design Entry HDL (Variant Editor will generate the variants.dat file).   Basically, it generates the appropriate assembly views in Allegro based on the population status defined in Variant Editor and that is all it does. (effectively deleting the outlines of unpopulated components and pushes the view to a different subclass)

    You can create your assembly drawings in Allegro and do not need to export it to an external CAD tool to generate them.  The only real issue is that to generate a Bottom Assembly drawing you will need to create a plot file and load it back into Allegro mirrored so you can see the assembly text right reading.    The main issue is the Bottom Assembly view can become out of date if you make placement changes and will have to regenerate the plot and load it back into Allegro mirrored.  Steve provided a suggestion about generated a scaled down format to maximum your assembly views which is a great tip – have used it myself.

    By “create plot a plot file” I mean use File > Export > IPF that generates a Cadence intermediate plot file of what is displayed than it can be loaded back into Allegro at different a scale, different class/subclass or mirrored for assembly documentation.  Using Manufacturing > Dimension/Draft > Create Detail can do the job as well but the Text Strings will get exploded in the resulting Assembly view which will make any resulting PDF not text searchable.

    Hope this helps – good luck.

    Cheers,

    Mike Catrambone
    Plexus Engineering Solutions

     
Reply
  • Hello,

    Manufacturing > Variants > Create Assembly Drawing is used in conjunction with the Variant Editor used by Allegro Design Entry HDL (Variant Editor will generate the variants.dat file).   Basically, it generates the appropriate assembly views in Allegro based on the population status defined in Variant Editor and that is all it does. (effectively deleting the outlines of unpopulated components and pushes the view to a different subclass)

    You can create your assembly drawings in Allegro and do not need to export it to an external CAD tool to generate them.  The only real issue is that to generate a Bottom Assembly drawing you will need to create a plot file and load it back into Allegro mirrored so you can see the assembly text right reading.    The main issue is the Bottom Assembly view can become out of date if you make placement changes and will have to regenerate the plot and load it back into Allegro mirrored.  Steve provided a suggestion about generated a scaled down format to maximum your assembly views which is a great tip – have used it myself.

    By “create plot a plot file” I mean use File > Export > IPF that generates a Cadence intermediate plot file of what is displayed than it can be loaded back into Allegro at different a scale, different class/subclass or mirrored for assembly documentation.  Using Manufacturing > Dimension/Draft > Create Detail can do the job as well but the Text Strings will get exploded in the resulting Assembly view which will make any resulting PDF not text searchable.

    Hope this helps – good luck.

    Cheers,

    Mike Catrambone
    Plexus Engineering Solutions

     
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