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Reference Designators Not Showing in PCB Assembly

stuartrumley

Why aren't the component reference designators appearing?  I have Assembly Top and Assembly Top Text enabled but no designator text appears. I've also noticed that there is no reference designator editing ability in the component PCB libraries. Is CS capable of producing an Assembly Drawing for PCB manufacturing?

 

 

 

 

 

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  • Hi Stuart,

     

    To my knowledge, CS does not automatically place a .Designator on the Assembly Text Top layer - you do this when creating the footprint in your PCB library.  At least this is my standard practice.  When creating a footprint, I will draw the component body outline on the Assembly Top layer, then Place Text using .Designator in the Text Properties dialog onto the Assembly Text Top layer.

     

    This works every time for me.

     

    Here's a link to the "Convert Special Strings" CircuitStudio gotcha that also plays into .Designator confusion:  https://www.element14.com/community/message/290126/l/parameter-link-broken#290126

     

    As for the .Designator editing in the library, I have not found a way to make it default to a certain text style or location that I set within the library.  Once the SCH design is ported to the PCB, I will use the Object Inspector to globally change the RefDes's as I see fit.  Clunky yes, but at least there's a workaround to get the job done - you get what you pay for....  I believe Thomas answered your question on this prior:  https://www.element14.com/community/message/299250/l/reference-designator-in-pcb-library-top-overlay#299250

     

     

    Bill

  • in reply to bills_alsentis

    Bill,

    Okay, I think I have it now. I will work with  that.  What threw me was that I did not see how to edit "Text" properties.  Now I see see that ".Designator" is actually a menu item that can be selected in the Text window.

    image

    I will want to put this on the same layer as the Assembly Top layer and not on a separate Top Text layer since I will want component outlines and reference designators to appear in the same window PCB editor window and subsequent file.

     

    I did see Thomas's reply a while back and misunderstood that I need to take action in Component PCB Library.  From his previous explanation I jumped to the conclusion that reference designators would show up on the PCB and I could edit the properties at that point and time.

     

    It seems odd that this bit about reference designators doesn't show up in the tutorials on building components in CS.  Reference designators being such a fundamental part of manufacturing a PCB you would think that would be one of the points to explain.

     

    Now I just need to update my component libraries, about 60 parts at this point. Maybe I can find a way to update all parts in one library at once?

    Thanks for jumping in on this Bill, I very much appreciate your rapid reply.

    Stuart