circuit design software can help design circuits, and easy-to-use circuit design software is a great help. In order to enhance everyone’s understanding of circuit design software, this article introduces protel circuit design software. The main content is how to convert protel format files into autocad format and print them and how to set the print operation.
1. Protel format conversion
Protel software has been very popular in China, from Protel3.3 (Autotrax 1.61) in the DOS era to Protel98 with EDA Client/Server (client/server), that is, C/S “framework” architecture, it is always the PCB design and The popular tool software in the manufacturing field has become the first choice of Electronic design workers.
In the standardized design management, the design document drawings must comply with the corresponding national standards, such as “Electronic Product Drawing Drawing Rules”, “Design Document Management Drawing” and “Printed Board Drawing”, etc., and because the Protel software is in English, Therefore, it is impossible to directly print out the drawings that meet the national standards. The common way to standardize the drawings is to print, that is, first print the tables and Chinese characters that meet the national standards on the paper, then put the paper into the printer, and use Protel software to print The printed board diagram is printed on it to form a document that meets the standard, but this method is very inefficient, and the graphics are often misaligned, and sometimes even reversed. After testing, the author found a simple method to make the printed board Convert the drawing to AUTOCAD format, and then print out the standard drawing in AUTOCAD at one time.
In the Protel software of FOR WINDOWS above version 1.5, a function of exporting PCB files to DXF format has been added, and the version above R12 of AUTOCAD has the function of importing DXF files, so that the PCB files of Protel can be read by AUTOCAD , the specific operations are described in detail below:
Open the printed board file to be converted in Protel software version 1.5, press the menu EDIT-SELECT-ALL to select the entire PCB file, press the menu FILE-EXPORT-DXF, enter the converted DXF file name in the dialog box, and press Click the OK button, and the conversion of the PCB file to the DXF format file is completed.
Run AUTOCAD-R12, press menu FILE-Import/Export-DXF IN to import DXF file, press FILE-SAVE AS to save the file as AUTOCAD DWG file.
Open the DWG format file in the Chinese version of AUTOCAD-R14, select all of them with the mouse, press the menu Modify-Copy, then open the edited design file format table that meets the national standard, press the menu Modify-Paste , X, Y scale are set to 25.4, paste the graphics into the table, and move to the appropriate position.
Press the menu format – layer, a dialog box will pop up, click LAYER with the mouse, select ALL IN USE in the SHOW column, and turn off the layers that do not need to be printed on the printed board, press the OK button, and print, you can print the required The printed board diagram is printed out in accordance with the national standard design file format.
Note 1: In the above operation, the file format of Protel must be version 1.5. When importing the DXF file, the R12 version of AUTOCAD software must be used, because only under this condition can the DXF file exported by Protel be imported by AUTOCAD. For non-version 1.5 Protel software, it can be saved in AUTOTRAX format, and then read into Protel1.5 FOR WINDOWS. In this way, all versions of Protel software can be printed out in this way.
Note 2: The reason for setting the scale to 25.4 in step 3 of the above operation is that the size unit of the exported DXF file is inches, while the unit in AUTOCAD is mm, so the correct size is obtained after multiplying by 25.4.
2. Protel print settings
The printing setting of sch is relatively simple, and the setting of pcb:
1. Open file>setup printer…to set up before printing.
2. In the pop-up printer setup menu, you must first select your printer: the first few are the default printers, and the last two are the printers we installed. (This is the case on my machine) One of the two suffixes is : final, one is: composite; the former one means: the printer only prints one layer at a time (no matter how many layers you choose, it is only printed several times), the latter one is to print all the layers you selected at one time, according to the needs Choose yourself!
3. Next step: Click the opTIons button below to set properties.
Assuming we choose final and then enter options to set, the options after entering generally do not need to be moved.
·scale is the printing ratio, the default is 1:1, if you want to print a full page, tick the small box,
·Show hole! The show hole on the right is very important. If you select it, you can print out the holes on the circuit board.
Well, click setup to set the paper size to complete the printer options.
It’s not over yet! Trouble! Go back to the dialog box for selecting printer properties, select layers, and set the printing layer. After entering, you can see it! Are you familiar with it? Choose according to your needs, and look at the following options :
·Silkscreen selects him, and the component can be printed out
· mid layer pads printing pads
· other: Prohibit the wiring layer.
If you want to print in reverse: the bottom layer we draw is actually the reverse (mirror image). For example, if I want to print the bottom layer in reverse, first tick a check mark in front of bottom on the layers, and then select bottom in the mirroring menu. It’s ok, remember, you must choose all of them.
The above is the relevant content of this “circuit design software”. Through this article, I hope everyone has a certain understanding of the knowledge explained above.