I have a difficult getting certain components to even move. When I click on them and try to drag, the arrow turns into the hand icon and it just moves the page. Seriously, this can’t be normal. It turns a minor task into something that takes 15 minutes. Any suggestions?
Also, I am trying to figure out how to do contoured (rounded, non-rectangular) pours. This is a feature I use regularly in Altium. How do I do it in Upverter?
And now my entire PCB has disappeared from the workflow. The schematic is there, and so are the nets. But no actual PCB. If I double click on the window, it brings up the board outline window, and shows the correct size. Any thoughts?
OK, I figured out the missing PCB thing. I had to clear my cache and restart the browser. After about 30 min it gets buggy and slow again until I refresh the browser.
I still can’t figure out the pours thing. In Altium, I can draw a pour with rounded corners and create a specific shape. All I can manage to do here is semi-circles, and they don’t actually pour.
OK, SORT of figured out a process. It’s extremely cumbersome though…it took me 25 minutes to create the right shape of copper pour, and I had to use an amalgamation of processes to do it.
Seems weird to omit this sort of user control over pours. You added all kinds of trace routing features like serpentine and other stuff but you hobbled the pour process. Why?
I think moving forward I’d use a different service. Lots of promise in this platform but the extra workload and I have to go through (and lack of engaged forum support) isn’t worth the free price for me.
Hi Matt,
Our development team is constantly working on the Upverter tool. The recent addition of the modular tool has been the priority lately and that means some front-end features and bugs have been pushed down the list. Lots of big things are happening here and we’re doing our best to get to it all, but I guess you could say we’re dealing with some ‘growing pains’.
I do my best to monitor and maintain the forum, and usually get notifications of new posts. When in doubt, if you’re having trouble, you can always @ me and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
@keith-lee-gstix That’s great; I understand the ‘growing pains’ part. What’s challenging for me though, is the insane amount of time I have to put into the existing platform just to complete the most mundane tasks.
I’m three weeks into a layout that should have taken 48 hours at the most, because little things don’t work right. Adding vias for example, are so complicated and the process is so slow that it’s downright weird. It’s pretty discouraging.
I’m curious as to how you’re adding vias. Normally, I’ll set which via to use in the trace tool:
Then, I’ll begin laying my trace. When I’m moving the signal to another layer, I’ll hit the number of the layer to which I want to move on the keyboard, and it drops a via where I last clicked and sets it as the active layer. Hitting the tilde (~) always drops a via and returns you to top copper, if you’re not already there.
Also, I always unpour all before dropping vias or the constraint manager goes nuts.
I’m using the icon labelled as ‘via’ on the side toolbar. It’s extremely slow, and the popup modal for the net features is so large that I can’t click ‘save’ unless I maximize the window to full screen. When I do that, the layout platform won’t let me un-maximize (the escape function stops working) unless I launch a new browser window.
The via tool you’re specifying is greyed out in my toolbar, and inaccessible.
Also I can’t seem to figure out how to add component pads to nets? I can see the net, but clicking on it does nothing. In Altium there’s an ‘edit nets’ feature which allows adding component pads to nets.
Also the ability to change PCB outline seems to have disappeared? I double click on the PCB, and the window no longer allows editing of the outline size.
The Via icon is in 3 different places. The first is in the Select tool. I’ve never used it and I’m not positive why it’s still there. It’s always greyed out, as far as I can tell.
The second location is in the Trace tool. That’s the one I mentioned last time.
The last is the Via tool. That’s the one you’ve been using, directly below the trace tool.
If you click the Via button in the trace tool and choose your preferred via settings there, every time you change layers while laying a trace, that via will be dropped and the trace will be moved to that layer.
