Urgent!

[JohnsonMiller]

Hi Guys,

In AD17, I am seeing a very strange case and need your help. Displayed designator of components is not what it supposed to be!
Following is an screenshot, array resistor is RA1, but it is displayed as RA11! It is the case for all components, any comments?

[mairomaster]

The only possible thing I can think of at the moment is:

Design - Board Options - Designator Display (change to Logical).

Are you using a multi-channel design? If that's the case there are more options for the designators format in the different channels.

[JohnsonMiller]

Thank you Mairomaster,
I am not using multi-channel design.
What does Logical and Physical means, anyway?

After facing this issue, I switched back to AD16.1, and this issue along with other reported problems all gone! So far so good.

I am getting confident that AD17 is not suitable, due to bugs.

BR,

[mairomaster]

It's not perfectly clear to me, but I think logical designators are whatever you have in the schematics normally and physical designators are produced after compiling the project.

If you use a multi-channel design for example, with a few repeated blocks, in the schematics you may have R1 lets say. However, R1 is present in every repeated block on the PCB, so you need a different physical designator for each one. You can setup the scheme those are produced - for example you might have R1_1, R1_2, R1_3, etc.

Physical designators can also contain room indexes and other different things, most of which are normally not used.

I started using AD17 recently and I haven't had a major problem yet, but some things are tricky and require some time figuring out.

[robertferanec]

That is what I was thinking - multi-channel design could change designators.

I have a lot of problems with AD17. Altium changed a lot of default settings and it is extremely annoying to search where to find things which always worked one way and suddenly they work differently. Especially, I am very very very disappointed, that they completely screwed the placement procedure which I am always using .... Now, I can not probe a net in schematic and then select a component, because selecting a component will clear the mask/selection of the probe action. It's so sad ... that was one of the most useful features (or bugs?).