PCB Editor and "find"

Well, once again what once worked does not now.

I just went back to go step by step to see if I left out any clues and wouldn't you know it, my screen will no longer pan to the "found" part. I can go to it from the world view window, but no longer from the "find" box. I swear I had it working, I was so happy, I did it many times just because I was proud of myself for figuring something out.

Very difficult to learn something when it keeps changing.......... Must be an option or preference setting I inadvertently changed.

I keep looking for the "uncomplicate" preference check box, but I can't find it.

Tom

To follow up

It might be me, perhaps I am doing something wrong but I think there is a bug with this "Find" and display operation in 16.5

I loaded up a design, clicked the Option pane then entered R1 in the entry box to find R1 on my board and the screen did not jump to the R1 location after hitting the enter key.

In general edit Mode I right clicked "Super filter" and ticked Symbol/pin and then did a find and every time the screen auto pans to the location of the symbol. Even using the more option under find and selecting multiple symbols jumps the display to where they are.

None of this worked before I set the superfilter to symbol/pin, in other words if the superfilter is turned off in GE mode then find is not working correctly.

Would love to know if you guys are seeing the same thing at your end.

I dunno if this is how the find is meant to work or not, but the sucker is not working right for me without invoking the superfilter as a first step..

It's really wierd.. Dont make sense.

Thanks Scott

Scott,

I'm seeing the same thing on my end.  The auto-zoom never works from the plain find tab settings.  After setting the super-filter for" symbols" though, it always auto-zooms to the component.

I tried this in all three edit modes. After realizing that changing edit modes also resets your super-filter to "off", I had to re-set it to "symbols" each time.   But using the super-filter mode, the auto-zoom to the "found" item seems to always work.  It never works on my systems without the super-filter setup.

Wouldn't want to call this a "bug" - just a "feature" (lol)

Roger

LOL Roger, man I really need more features like that ha ha.

Hey I think the super filter can be about set to anything. It seems just turning it on is the key to the find operation working as we would expect. I will test a bit more and let you guys know.

Glad to see I had not lost my mind and you can replicate what I found..

Thanks Scott

Tom, Roger I did a bit more bit twiddling and found a few things. In general edit mode you can right click "Super Filter" and choose any item in that menu then turn off the superfilter and you will be able to find parts with highlight and zoom to where they are located on the board. If you then choose to do something else like change modes to etch edit then the Find part operation will not jump to the part if you are zoomed in on another area of the board. You have to be zoomed so you can see where the part might be. 

The find part or symbol/pin operation reverts to only highlighting a part in either the world view or if you are zoomed out to see the board.

Thats ok if your zoomed out but useless if you are zoomed in on another part of the board.

The other option if you are zoomed in on one particular part of the board and you choose options find a symbol/pin is to use the zoom selection icon to jump to the parts location. Thats kind of useless too as who would think to do that ? and why should you really have to.

It kind of gets worse from here. Lets assume for a sec you are working on a moderate sized board and you are in "EE" mode and you decide to route a trace from c1 that might be located somewhere else on the board. You choose options > find, enter your symbol reference C1 in the dialog box and hit enter and the UI just sits there. It does not take you to the location you requested unless you then choose to hit the icon Zoom Selection to get there. In certain circumstances you may end up either zoomed out from the part or zoomed in correctly so it is easy to route from a pin. Dont think this cuts the mustard. Honestly the mechanics of this operation of finding a part with zoom to location is not workable for anyone that would like to be productive with the editor IMHO.

Saved the best for last.. There is more. Suppose we are zoomed in on a part of our board and we want to go to say c3 thats at the other end of the board. This time we decide to click the icon on the toolbar called "show element" we could also use the F4 key to do this. So we hit the F4 key for show element then go to find > Options and enter C3 in the dialog box. The screen will pan to the location of the part and highlight it but there is a window that pops up covering the actual part we were looking for with info about the part LOL....Hard to believe..

Now one could argue that show element is not really a find operation as we want info about a particular element. The point is that the actual UI will pan to where that part is located which is what we were after so the begging question is why on earth it does not do that by default for any find operation at a certain Zoom level.

I dunno, seems to me this is broke in a bad way or not very well thought out period. It's hard to be productive when you literally got to will the software to do what you think it should do for a given operation. New users will have a horrible time getting to grips with these hidden treasures. Hard to believe that find feature ever made it through QA...

I think by way of a suggestion a better method would be to treat the find operation like this. If the object you wish to find is not in the scope of your window then the Software should know that you wish to both find the object and zoom/pan to that location and highlight the object too. That might be an ez fix. Having to invoke a "Super Filter" operation first before you then choose Find is non productive.

Thanks Scott.