Tidy schematic after pinswap

Question

I am working on a design using a microcontroller using analogue inputs and digital I/O. The analogue pins can be swapped and the digital pins can be swapped at will (with commensurate changes in the firmware). I have set the swap levels on the part to allow this. I put short wires on each pin and named them and did likewise with the parts they connected to. The parts on the board layout are connected correctly but the layout would be better if some pins were swapped. So, on the schematic I swap some pins and the board layout correctly reflects the changes. The problem is that the schematic is now a mess wire wires draped all over the microcontroller. I tried using Bus/Net but the result is similar.

Is there a way of using pinswap without making a mess of the schematic?

autodeskguest · Accepted Answer

James Thurgood wrote on Sat, 06 February 2016 09:07 Is there a way of using pinswap without making a mess of the schematic? Stop and actually think about it. How do you expect this to work? Laying out a schematic to be nicely readable requires much higher level judgement above the mere connection topology Eagle knows about. This isn't going to work for the same reason Eagle doesn't have some automatic "beautify" function for the schematic. Too much high level knowledge and artistic judgement is required to do anything useful, not to mention the algorithms would be very complex even if this were possible somehow. It will continue to be your job to draw a clear schematic for the reasonably forseable future. -- Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca. Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

autodeskguest · Answer

On 7/02/2016 3:07 a.m., James Thurgood wrote:

I am working on a design using a microcontroller using analogue inputs
and digital I/O.   The analogue pins can be swapped and the digital pins
can be swapped at will (with commensurate changes in the firmware). I
have set the swap levels on the part to allow this. I put short wires
on each pin and named them and did likewise with the parts they
connected to. The parts on the board layout are connected correctly but
the layout would be better if some pins were swapped.   So, on the
schematic I swap some pins and the board layout correctly reflects the
changes.   The problem is that the schematic is now a mess wire wires
draped all over the microcontroller. I tried using Bus/Net but the
result is similar.

Is there a way of using pinswap without making a mess of the schematic?

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Hi James

It is what it is and the use of stub nets from the pins is as good as

you can do.

When the pin swap occurs, the end of the net segments attached to the

pins are moved. If the last run to the pin is long, it appears as if

lot of the schematic has been defaced.

In this case there is a technique you can employ that you may benefit from.

Just before you do the pin swap, drop a junction on the net just out

from each of the pins you will swap. That will make the segment

connected to the pin only as long as that from the junction to the pin,

like a stub. In that way only the nets in the area of the pins are

affected and the clean up is easier to envisage.

HTH

Warren