- The PCB panel is a very useful panel
in helping you to navigate your designs on the PCB end.
So, if I want to view my PCB panel,
I'll just go into my View tab here,
and in the middle here, I have some PCB options here,
and here I have my PCB panel.
Just click to turn on a panel,
similar to My Projects and Libraries panel,
but this is very, very useful in helping
to navigate through my design.
So, I have a whole bunch of drop down options here.
I can choose depending on what
I may be specifically looking for.
So, for example, let's take a look,
maybe I wanna find some specific components.
So, I'll click on components, here.
And then I have a number
of different component classes I can run through.
I can run through All Components,
and that's just gonna give me a list
of all of my components throughout my design here.
And, I can click on any of these
and it's gonna kinda jump right to
and highlight those specific components.
And this is very useful in itself as,
of course, in electronics design,
you're gonna have a pretty complex board
with a whole number of electronics components.
This is a fairly simple board in my case.
So, it just makes things easier
to find in a more complex board.
In addition to this,
I have additional classes I can run through.
So maybe I only wanna see components of a particular layer,
let's say my bottom side components,
top side components, whatever it might be there.
So, in this case, I just have the two layers,
my bottom side and top side components,
here, then, to each layer.
So, if we remember when placing these,
I didn't use too much, but I just placed
the single connector here, on my bottom side.
And everything else on my top side.
So you can see I only have
this one connector, JP2, on my bottom side.
And, if I went to my top side components,
should be all of my other components there.
So, we have a number of other handy,
kind of search navigation tools here.
One I use quite often is also Nets,
so I can search through each
and every net I've created for this project.
And what's really useful here,
is you can actually color-code or highlight,
turn on and off as you may need.
So, here it's just showing me all my nets here.
But, let's say I wanted to highlight,
or show, or change the color of a particular net,
I can do that. So, let's see what I have here.
Maybe I'll find a ground, for example.
So, if I just click on the net itself,
it should kind of highlight that particular net for you.
But then you can actually check off To Highlight,
and I've actually changed the color from my ground as well.
And to do this, I can just double click,
and I have a bunch of options here
that I can play around with.
In this case, I'll just change the color,
so it's a little bit easier to see.
Yellow changes to green just to show
the indication here and say okay.
And now I can see that all of my ground traces,
or ground nets, here are gonna be shown in green.
And now I can leave these in green and continue my design.
So, I'm just essentially highlighting
all my ground nets here, just to make it
a little bit easier to read, potentially.
Or, of course, just turn that check off,
and then it's back to just your normal layer color coding.
Maybe I'll turn on my ground,
maybe VCC, I could to the same, and color code.
You could do this potentially for each and every net,
but generally, maybe just for a few nets
that you if really want to highlight to that information.
Make it a little bit easier to navigate.
And then, of course, you can turn these on or off at will.
So, the PCB panel, just a very useful tool,
in really helping you to navigate
and find appropriate things within your project.