Eagle: Selecting a group by signal name?

Question

In the eagle board layout, I want to group a specific signal specified by its name so I can move it to another layer via the CHANGE LAYER command.

I do not manually want to click on every segment of the signal, after all, there is no point in naming something if you can not refer to it by its name.

So far, I have figured out that SHOW $signalname will highlight my signal, but I will not be able to apply a CHANGE command to the highlighted signal.

On the other hand, GROUP will select a GROUP on which CHANGE commands will work, but seems only suitable for selecting parts with the mouse, via a rectangle or one segment per click.

Is it possible to accomplish my goal without either delving into ULP or manually hacking the *.brd xml?

You can select an signal if you click on the group command and then "Ctrl+Shift+LeftClick" the signal - this will select everything connected to the wire or via you click on. Will that help? — Tom Carpenter, Feb 19 '16 at 15:23
Thanks, @TomCarpenter, I never knew about that one. You should post it as an answer :) — bitsmack, Feb 19 '16 at 16:35

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 19 '16 at 16:42

While it doesn't allow you to group an entire net by name, you can use the group tool and mouse to click to select all connected segments of a wire which will certainly speed up selecting a net.

Simply click on the group tool, and then Ctrl+Shift+Left Click on a wire. This will add all connected sections of a wire to the group. If you only want to add the selected section of a wire, or component (etc.) then you can use Ctrl+Left Click to add just the segment you clicked on to the current group.

As with most mouse based actions in Eagle, if you don't see the whole wire highlighted after the first click, check the bottom left corner of the window to see if it is asking you whether this is the right wire - if there is any ambiguity Eagle won't immediately apply the action, but rather allow you to right click to select the next possible wire, or left click to accept the current one.

You can do this for multiple wires in the same group. Simply follow the same mouse action on the next wire and it will add all connected segments to the current group.

To clear the current selection (to start a new group), enter the command group ;. Then you can start again with the group tool.

Eagle: Selecting a group by signal name?

1 Answers1