altium
I have a PcbDoc in Altium Designer with several components in a room. I want to select some components by dragging a box around them.
I can select them if I start dragging in the gray or black areas. But if I start in the red room, I reposition the whole room.
So I double-clicked the room and locked it.
Still, I can't start a selection box inside the red area. What's the trick?
I asked the Altium support if there is either a way do disable this feature or to get a detailed description to understand what it does.
This is loosely translated from the German response:
If you are seeing green/red lines when placing components in the PCB document, this can be interpreted as follows: It is a kind of feedback from Altium Designer regarding the length and position of the connecting lines. Red lines indicate, that there is still a better position available with respect to intersections and connection length. Should the line show green, then this is an indication that the length of the connecting lines is well matched.
I am not really satisfied with that response but I could just disable .... oh wait.
However, there currently is no way to turn off this mode during placement.
Well, at least its a great example of implementing a feature that no-one needs because its not even documented how it works :)
I believe I found the answer. In addition to not having "Restrict to 90/45" checked, you also need to have "Preserve Angle When Dragging" unchecked. This is also in the Preferences --> PCB Editor --> Interactive Routing settings.
Best Answer
You cannot start a selection box above a primitive (component, text, room), as Altium will assume you want to drag that primitive. What you can do, is enter a selection mode.
Altium's hot-key system makes this very easy, just hit
sand then choose whatever mode you want (e.g.ifor selecting items inside a rectangle).But as Araho said, most of the time, rooms are just cluttering your design. I would only use them for multi-channel designs, where I have many identical circuits and want to copy the layout of one room to the rest.