Planar Spiral Inductor Design Process

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Hi Steve,

I watched a demo of this add-on and it seems excellent. 

I've been trying to get this app to load with no luck. Do you have any insight as to what I might be doing wrong?

I've checked my allegro site which is "C:/Cadence/SPB_17.2/share/local/pcb"

Inside the above directory is a "skill" folder. I have placed the allegro.ilinit file in there with the following contents: 

printf"Start Loading Skill files:"
load("./nsWare/nsware.il" "nsware" )
printf("done Loading Skill files:")

When I start up PCB editor, I see no print statements and I don't see the nsware menu at the top of the screen.

Do you know what I might be doing wrong? Could this be an issue with the LITE version of PCB editor? I have read that the LITE version is not equipped with a skill cmd ability, but skill files can be loaded "at start up", whatever that means. I should mention that I'm using 17.2 2016

Best Regards,

Mike 

I think the key as excellon1 has said is to make sure that the allegro.ilinit file is in your %HOME%\pcbenv folder. Then restart Allegro. 

Sorry but I am still having trouble with this. 

I can see my home directory by typing "set" in the command line, showing the following. 

Navigating to that directory, I see the following. 

Inside allegro.ilinit, I have this: 

printf"Start Loading Skill files:"
load("./nsWare/nsware.il" "nsware" )
printf("done Loading Skill files:")

At startup of "OrCAD PCB designer Lite" i expect to see at least one print statement: "start loading skill files", even if everything about my nsware install is wrong. I don't see this, so I'm thinking that allegro.ilinit is not being called at all. Is there a way to confirm that this is being called? Is my assessment of my home directory location correct using the "set" command? 

Sorry for the troubles. I really appreciate your guys help. 

When you install allegro/Orcad it is way better to install it for all users of the computer. It looks like you installed it for just you because of the location of the SPB_DATA folder.

It is some work but I would uninstall what you have, do a re-boot and then re-install. Install all options and also check the box to install for "All Users". I will check the nsware and see if it works.

If you have any files such as footprints or board files, padstacks etc make a copy of them befoure you uninstall.

When you install allegro/Orcad it is way better to install it for all users of the computer. It looks like you installed it for just you because of the location of the SPB_DATA folder.

It is some work but I would uninstall what you have, do a re-boot and then re-install. Install all options and also check the box to install for "All Users". I will check the nsware and see if it works.

If you have any files such as footprints or board files, padstacks etc make a copy of them befoure you uninstall.

Thanks for the advice. I'm still having some issues. When I uninstalled and reinstalled, it actually still used the appdata/roaming/blahblahblah directory that I showed before when i rebooted. To mitigate this, I deleted the directory and also deleted my Cadence directory in C: . I then uninstalled an reinstalled the program again, and it created the directory you mentioned. When I first start PCB lite, I see now using the set command where my localenv and home are. I also see that .jrl files were created upon startup of PCB editor lite for the first time in the home directory below. This is all perfectly fine. 

set home = C:/SPB_Data

..............

set localenv = C:/SPB_Data/pcbenv

However I still can't get those print statements at startup to show, which is currently my main concern because if the print statements don't show, then the commands clearly aren't being called so nsware will naturally not be called either. Here's an image of my new directory. where allegro.ilinit resides.

And here's what's in the .txt file. I've removed the loading of nsware because I can't even get the allegro.ilinit to work properly so I should eliminate that step in the debugging process first:

printf"Start Loading Skill files:"

Note that if I type the above command straight into the command line, it says the following. Should I be concerned by this? Or does it simply have to do with the fact that skill files can only be ran at startup in the lite version. 

E- Command not found: printfStart Loading Skill files:

I feel like this topic has diverged from the original intention, so I'd be happy to make another thread if that would be best. Again, thanks for the help.

Best,

Mike 

try typing ns_planar at the command line and see if that starts anything, that is the app command line name

just also noticed that the first line is missing () which may stop all of it working try replacing printf"Start Loading Skill files:" with printf("Start Loading Skill files:")

Hi there Mike. I tried to load the planar software and I could not get it to work. When allegro starts up it couldn't even find it in my skill files folder but there were no issues seeing the other skill files that resided in there. I looked at the actual .il file and it looks to be encrypted. Also in the docs that come with it there is a mention of needing the nsWare framework.
So perhaps that framework is really needed. I didn't bother going any further.

The utility looks kind of neat but there is a chicken & egg thing going on here. Before you create any etch your going to have to know the inductance of the etch otherwise it will be a shot in the dark. With a little practice using allegro you should be able to knock out what you need manually. That pic I attached above took less than 2 minutes to do in Allegro and that was done manually. Shapes will get you there   

All the best..

This just works for me. The pdf that is part of the zip file contains all the instructions, Put the contents into a folder say C:\SPB_Data\nsWare) then in your allegro.ilinit file add the line load ("C:/SPB_Data/nsWare/ns_planar.il" "nsWare"), add a return, then save the file. Make sure you add the "nsWare" at the back which is the password for the skill to run then restart PCB Editor and type ns_planar at the command line in PCB Editor to start the app). The instructions are very clear.