I'm in the process of designing a carrier for an existing PCB. The upper layer of the carrier should contain pads to connect to the holes on the side of the original board.
I can re-create the lay-out by hand, but this is an awful lot of work. Can I extract the lay-out of the pads as footprint to a new PCB? I've tried to make a library out of the current board with Design -> Make PCB Library, but this doesn't provide an end result.
Can I somehow use the IPC tool to create a package out of the current board including a footprint?
Best Answer
Go to your board.
Select what you want to get. (Use Shift+S to set only the current layer visible and selectable)
Ctrl+C (and don't forget to mouse-click an origin after, or nothing gets copied - make it the new component origin if you like planning ahead like I do)
Go to the PCBLibrary (or make a new one)
Tools -> New Blank Component
Ctrl+V
Click where you want your pads.
Edit the component properties and 3D model as required.
Ctrl+S
Done.
EDIT: Following our chat
For posterity, to quickly select a group of objects with same or similar properties, you can use:
Right-Click on object: Select "Find Similar Objects"
In the menu find the properties that are unique to the group of objects and select "same" from the dropdown.
Select Apply and then Ok and you get a listing for all the items matching your parameters, while they also become selected. (Technically usually only Ok works, but it may sometimes give the dreaded DLL based pop-up of doom, while preceding it with apply never gave me that).
To select on part of a parameter you can use an Asterisk (), like selecting all objects with a name that starts with JP, you can select "same" in "Name" and type "JP" and all JP1, JP101, JP2938, etc will become selected.