A little help with Protel DXP?

[NeoY2k]

Hi everyone,
Protel DXP/Altium designer is a soft that I don't know very well.

I'm having a couple issues with it.

Let's start with the first one:



- Look at the picture. There's a guard ring. It's surrounded by a plane.

I want to connect these two together.

I don't want the plane to overlap the ring (that's why it's in "keepout" mode, but selecting "don't pour over same net" in the plane properties would have had the same effect).

But I can't find the way to tel Protel to connect these two in only one point. I can draw a line between the two, it will display ok without errors unless I rebuild the plane. And even if I don't rebuild the plane, the Gerber output is corrupted (as if I had rebuilt the plane).

Can someone explain me?

Thank you,
Nicolas

[daveB0360]

Hi Neo,
To my knowledge, this is an issue with Protel,
What I do in my software, is assign the plane and guard ring to the same net in the netlist. The keep out parameter will prevent the two encroaching and a line can then be drawn at any single point between the two elements without issue or data error. The software still flags that there are elements within a keep out area but you can filter that error so it is ignored.

Alternatively, output the data without a connection as 274X and import that into a gerber editor such as gerbtool or GCcam and manually add the trace directly in the gerbers.

If you would like, as a one off, I can make this edit for you if you'd like to export your gerber data and email it to me in 274X

Cheers
DaveB
TopCopper Ltd