Electronic – Altium repeated sheets

altium

I have a sheet that needs to be repeated 30 times. Normally this has not been an issue.

However, one of the components in the sheet is a shift register that has a serial in and a serial out (for chaining multiple devices together).

A single serial signal comes from the top level, and goes into the sheet to the serial in of the first sheet and the serial out is to go to the serial in of the next sheet etc..

I'm having a bit of difficulty arranging my sheets so that its easy to wire, and easy to see what exactly is happening.

Any thoughts of how I can pipe the output of one sheet into the input of the same sheet (repeated) ?

I had 30 sheets before, but when I had to make a change in the wiring, I had to make 30 changes overall and I don't want to do that again, which is why I'm trying to do it this way.

Here's an example of what I mean.

enter image description here

This is a shift register, where Q7S is the serial output. So this shift register can be cascaded to form a long chain.

But there is more stuff happening on this schematic that is not shown, and so this entire schematic has been been made into a sheet symbol because everything that happens here, gets repeated a bunch of time.

enter image description here

For the very first shift register, I feed it data that comes from my microcontroller (DATA_IN_1). But the Q7S from sheet RELAY_1, becomes the serial input for sheet RELAY_2, and so.

The problem I was having, was setting up the connections (wires, busses, net names) so that I can get the connection I wanted so that I can cascade the shift registers together.

I say "the problem I was having", is because I ended up changing my design that I no longer needed to cascade them together and so didn't need to worry about how the connections were. However, I still would like to know, and it might be a good question for this community. This could also be a limitation of the software. I don't know.

Best Answer

If i interpret you correctly you have made a design and put it into a schematic page. The design does a specific function. Now you want to add 30 of these functions and connect them together. If you find an error you would like to make changes to the design on one place and have it propagated to all 30 instances of the function.

I think that you should start to look at these pages: