An Intro to Regular Expressions
Most of us have used wildcards to find files matching “*.txt.” Regular Expressions are like wildcards on steroids. Knowing how they work will improve your use of CadEnhance tools and will spill over to help you in your everyday engineering tasks.
Here’s a link describing the usage of Regular Expressions in our tools:
Regular Expressions in CadEnhance Tools
Or, for a great learning resource, we recommend this tutorial:
Click here to Goto the RegexBuddy website.
Tools for PCB and IC Package Designers
dalTools is hands down the most popular productivity plugin for Allegro PCB designers.
At CadEnhance, we love the layer, browse, and delay tools. They make it so easy to review, annotate and verify designs without navigating through a thousand complicated menus.
Another one, the dal swap tool is a key resource working with our FpgaPinPlanner tool to swap FPGA pins at the PCB level
PDF to Excel Converters
Its disappointing that in 2023 most manufacturers provide their part pinouts only in tables (or worse) in PDF datasheets. PartBuilder needs the pin-data in a more structured format like a spreadsheet (either .csv or .xls(x)) formats.
Trying to cut and paste text from PDF pages to spreadsheets manually can be a very difficult chore. But there are many tools to help you with this.
Free Online Converters
The free online2pdf website offers a way to upload your PDF file, select a range of pages to convert, and then it will provide a link for you to download a spreadsheet containing the extracted data. In most cases, this tool does an amazing job on the table creation.
Click here to goto Online2pdf.com
If Free Fails…Or Your Data is Sensitve
When the Free Pdf Converters fail, you may need more fine-grained control over the conversion process. Your company may also frown upon using a web based service to convert sensitive data for you.
In these circumstances, There are 2 inexpensive tools, Able2Extract and the AABBY FineLine PDF Reader that we recommend to our customers to get the job done locally on your own computer network
Able2Extract Professional 18 Screenshot (click to goto their website)
Even in you don’t invest in CadEnhance products, these tools can be a great addition to your toolbox, for converting Data Tables from Engineering Documents to Excel files for your calculations.
This CadEnhance YouTube Channel provides informative online videos to help you work with Able2Extract.
And finally, who knew a schematic could be funny?
From the genius mind of Randall Munroe at xkcd.com. You’ll find a new funny detail in this every time you take another peek. Comic courtesy of xkcd.com/730, click to enlarge