Friday, November 8, 2013

Drill Table - Bugs

As shown below you can get different results for the Drill Table in Altium depending on which method you choose to display your drill tables

Shown below are Drill tables for the same design with different results.



The new drill table shows a 124 holes.


New Drill Table ( Menu > Place > Drill Table)





While the legacy (.legend) Drill tables has 118 holes for the same design.  I believe when Altium created the new drill table the legacy table was inadvertently broken.

If you have legacy (.legend) drill tables in your older designs and you re-spin the board you need to delete the legacy (.legend) table and replace it with the new Drill Table. 

If you leave the legacy (.legend) drill table in your design, the drill table may not be in agreement with the NC Drill file.  

I had a couple projects on hold recently because the fab drawing was not in agreement with the drill files. I explained to my fabricator that I was using Altium, that they should follow the NC Drill file and ignore the Altium Drill table.

Also it is common to have dimmed rows in the the legacy table on the fab drawing as shown below if symbols are used to display the drills. The fix is to use characters.

The legacy Drill Table (.legend)

Symbols












As shown below changing the same legacy drill table above to use characters fixed the dimmed rows. 

Also if you have a lot of drills in the legacy table symbols may be repeated for different size holes, which is why another reason why characters should be used instead of symbols.

The legacy Drill Table (.legend)

Letters












I filed a bug (#3422) which has zero votes at Altium Live. So I'm not expecting to see a fix for the legacy drill table.

When I re-spin a board I need to remember to delete the .legend table and place the new drill table. 

PCB Release Failed


Another problem has surfaced, when using the PCB Release Manager to Generate Outputs.

Output generation failed with .legend (legacy drill tables).

Solution !!!

Always replace the .legend (legacy Drill Tables) with the new Drill Table.

PCB > Place > Drill Table