I have a circuit which has been split into two separate halves but are produced together on the one panel. Ran both boards up through IPG fine separately at first and then the two CADs were amalgamated into a single panel; so far, so good. BUT... In order to save a production process these two boards are now to arrive at ICT with a couple of interconnecting ribbon cables already linking the two boards. (When split from the supporting fret the two boards then simply fold together).
I cannot guarantee that there is no duplication of node names between the two sets of CAD. I tried merging the two into one board (i.e. no longer panelised and including the cable connections) but the last point about node names makes that very dangerous. I cannot see an easy way of incorporating the interconnections from one board across to the other. You cannot enter a Node Library in IPG across the board pair as a panel as each board type only presents its own internal nodes (i.e. one side of the cabling) for selection.
The attempt to merge the two CAD into one also lost my board rotations (270 for one, 90 for the other) and offsets.
I'm sure there must be a way to overcome this but I just seem to keep coming up against a brick wall whichever way I try to approach the problem.
No fixturing has yet been built but I would like to incorporate the two boards AND the interconnections for better IPG analysis and fixture wiring.
Must I run up the job as a separate pair and only try to develop a node lib test for the cabling after the jig is built? I fear this will result in poor analysis and guarding for many initial tests.
Has anyone else come across this scenario and worked out the best way to overcome it?
Thanks in advance,
DML
I cannot guarantee that there is no duplication of node names between the two sets of CAD. I tried merging the two into one board (i.e. no longer panelised and including the cable connections) but the last point about node names makes that very dangerous. I cannot see an easy way of incorporating the interconnections from one board across to the other. You cannot enter a Node Library in IPG across the board pair as a panel as each board type only presents its own internal nodes (i.e. one side of the cabling) for selection.
The attempt to merge the two CAD into one also lost my board rotations (270 for one, 90 for the other) and offsets.
I'm sure there must be a way to overcome this but I just seem to keep coming up against a brick wall whichever way I try to approach the problem.
No fixturing has yet been built but I would like to incorporate the two boards AND the interconnections for better IPG analysis and fixture wiring.
Must I run up the job as a separate pair and only try to develop a node lib test for the cabling after the jig is built? I fear this will result in poor analysis and guarding for many initial tests.
Has anyone else come across this scenario and worked out the best way to overcome it?
Thanks in advance,
DML
First you'll need to analyze that the board's does not have the same node names. Probably GND is the one that is repeated, so I recommend to manually change the GND node name to GND_ on one of the baord (or any other name) since it is sure that there will be a jumper between the two and you want to test that there is a jumper between GND and GND_
To analyze the node names I recommend using vi to edit the board and only get the list of nodes. There might be other ways to do it, but I found this easy and semi-automatic. *+Bold Italics are vi commands+*
1. Save the board as Node Format
1.1 open a copy of your board file with vi.
2. Search for CONNECTIONS +*/CONNECTIONS*+
3. Position your cursor at the CONNECTION row and delete everything above +*:1,. del*+
4. Delete Device's Connections using the following vi macro *+:map F jmb/\;^Md'b+*
4.1 In order to Insert ^M in the vi macro line use *Ctrl-V then
4.2 What this vi macro do is to map the *F* key (you can use any other letter) to first move one row down and mark that as b (for beginning, but you can name it with any other letter) then search for *;* (since it is a special character needs to be written with the escape backslash, then hit enter, then delete from there to the *b* mark.
5. All you have to do is position your cursor at the beginning of your node file and hit *F* as many times to delete all devices's and pins and your file will end have a list of only your nodes.
6. Delete all spaces on the file +*:1,$ s/\ //g*+
6.1 Do this for both board files.
7. You can create a ksh script to verify that there are no repeating nodes, but it is easier to just create a new file with the two list of nodes with the following Unix command *+cat node1 node2 > nodes.csv+*
8. You might want to add a marker on the node2 file at the very beginning before doing the paste command in order to identify the beginning of the file. I recommend a fake node name like: BOARD2NODES
9. Open the file nodes.csv on MS Excell and use the Auto Formatting function to highlight duplicates.
This method is just to verify if there are no repeated nodes. Probably using sed is more automatic, but I still like to view what I'm doing.
You'll need to manually change the names on Board Consultant. I recommend Board Consultant since it will change the names on both board and board_xy. Hopefully there are no more duplicates than GND.
What I did on my project (if I don't recall it wrong) was that I manually create tests for the jumper wires crossing board boundaries like:
connect a to 1:GND
connect s to 2:GND_
jumper 8....
But I thin there are better ways to do it.
To create both boards as single I think the best method is to use your CAD converter to do that. TestSight is able to handle i3070 board files as inputs so I think is possible to easily merge both (and let TestSight accommodate coordinates, offsets and rotations) to create a single board and board_xy at the end.
It is then simple to create a PDL (Part Description Language) to create your jumpers. Then IPG will be able to consider all surrounding circuitry on both boards.
Once you have your boards merged, plot your fixture to verify all testpoints lands on the right x,y location
Hope this helps.