Can't place parts in Orcad PCB... :-( Hint appreciated! :-) 

I'm running an old Orcad Capture/PCB 16.2 - and have obviously been away from it too long!

I can netlist (with the usual renaming warnings) and open the netlist in Orcad PCB. I get a (correct) list of parts when I go to Place/Manually - but there's no Quickview preview and I can't place anything. There should be an error message to hint what's wrong - but I don't know where to look (netrev.lst is "clean" with no error/oversight/warning detected). Very, very frustrating!

I'm sure this is a total beginners mistake - can anyone help me out a bit? It would be greatly appreciate! :-)

Thanks,

 Anders (Denmark)

The parts, along with padstacks, that you can place are controlled by your psmpath and padpath variables. Look in your User Preferences >Paths >Library >psmpath and padpath to ensure that the paths point to the physical parts.

If they do can you place parts using the Placement form placement list tab set to 'Package symbols' and the Advanced Settings tab has 'Library' enabled?

Thanks for the reply!

I've spent quite some time playing around with the pasmpath and padpath. (The interface for changing those does not seem totally stable?) Tried both forward and back slashes (desperation will drive me to such ;-). In any case I can see both Orcads default libs and my own footprints listed in text when I change to 'Package symbols' (if I check "library" instead of "database" in the advanced settings tab - but still no preview, and I can't place anything.

However there's definitely something cheesy with the paths. I had a space and some dashes in my library path. Just now I came think it might be a problem... Initially I only removed it in the psmpath and padpaths. Now I would expect the symbols would disappear from from the 'Package symbols' list. They didn't. Not even after a restart of Orcad PCB. Anyway, I've removed it from the actual path too. But now I do indeed get errors like "WARNING(SPMHNI-337): Unable to load symbol 'DO41' for device 'DIODE 1N5819 SCHOTTKY 40V-1A__1': WARNING(SPMHUT-127): Could not find padstack CIRTHR-1MM1-2MM8." when trying to netlist... After messing a bit around, I'm back at clean (no spaces/dashes) paths and only back slashes in the paths (inserted by browsing). I get "flawless" netrev.lst when netlisting - but still can't preview or place anything! There's a screen shot of path and placement dialogue at http://www.hi5.dk/OrcadPCB-01.png. psmpath is just one level down.

If I ignore the missing preview - I might suspect I'm missing something in the placement process. But I do not remember it being a problem earlier. And I'm very frustrated about not even getting warnings or errors...

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your time! Best regards, Anders

Thanks to NordCad for the solution!

You/I should be seeing check boxes to the left of refdes in the manual placement dialogue box! I didn't. It seems this is a issue with Windows 7. The text of the dialogue boxes is a bitmapped font - and the default Windows 7 fonts scales the text "over" the check boxes in the placement dialogue. Thus, my "selection" was only selecting/highlighting the refdes text (which curiously is supported - I still haven't found out what the purpose might be).

In any case, after applying the hack below I can actually place part in OrcadPCB 16.2 under Windows 7 64-bit (I assume this also applies to Allegro - although it's less likely that people will be running older versions of those): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/developingfordynamicsgp/archive/2009/11/25/windows-7-bitmap-fonts-and-microsoft-dynamics-gp.aspx?CommentPosted=true 

Hope this might help others from the frustrations and immense waste of time I experienced! :-)