I tried searching the community, but couldn't find the answer to this. I'm new to OrCAD and having trouble figuring out how to do some of the simplest tasks. I'm using PCB Editor V.16.6.
In this case, I'm creating a custom footprint for a 640 pin connector. The pattern for the footprint includes pairs of rows that are offset from the neighboring pairs of rows vertically (by exactly one pin spacing). I had no problem creating the pads and placing all 640 pins correctly. I was using the matrix tool available on the options pane, so each time I placed a pin, it was placing 2 in the X and 8 in the Y for a total of 16 pins. I continued on like this, and meticulously entered the coordinates for each of these blocks of pins. No problems so far.
The problem starts when I try to re-number the pins. I'm starting at the bottom left corner and increasing pin count vertically and then to the left. The renumber pins dialog window seems to make sense and should do what I want, but, because columns are staggered vertically by one pin spacing, it will start to label the first two columns from bottom to top, but at the top of the columns, it skips a number because in the third column there is a pin that is one position higher than in either of the first two columns. Then, when it gets to the third column, it skips a number at the bottom because the first two columns have a pin in the lowest position, but the third column does not. The number that it skips is where there would be a pin (if the footprint were a perfect matrix) but there is no pin because of the staggered spacing of the columns. It continues on in this manner until it reaches the end of the footprint, but because of the skipped numbers, it finishes on 719 instead of 640.
So, when I'm creating a device file for the footprint, I specify that it has 640 pins, which is fine. When I try to read that device in to a BRD file (via a netlist where every pin is connected to a single net) then it will read in the netlist up to the first 640 pins, but pin # 641 creates an error because the device isn't supposed to have that many pins. In actuality, the device doesn't have that many pins, it's just that some of the pin numbers got skipped by the auto rename pin function. So now I can't assign any pin# higher than 640 in the netlist, even though the pin #s go up to 719.
I guess my question is, how can I keep the auto rename pin function from skipping pin numbers just because my footprint isn't a perfect square matrix? Do I have to go in and manually rename each of the 640 pins myself? If so, why is there an auto rename pin function in the first place? Any help would be appreciated.