Welcome to the CADSTARguys Blog - Information, hints, tips and my waffle on the CADSTAR Printed Circuit Board design suite.

Please note that all names used are completely fictitious and any thing written is my own personal opinion or knowledge and not related in any way to either my employers or their customers (or Zuken).
Also this is not a replacement for proper Maintenence/support and you should read the help files before asking anything techy:).

Wednesday 16 June 2010

Life is much better with multiple monitors.

Something that really puzzles me is why so many designers are still using a single monitor to design with.

A 2nd monitor will cost about £100 with another £30-40 on a video card and you open a whole new world of visualisation of your designs.

CADSTAR supports multiple monitors and easily allows you to maximise your design view on screen.

You can have the schematic on one screen while editing the PCB on another, cross probe between them both so you can select symbols in one and the components or nets are highlighted in the other.



This even works from schematic through to PREditor.

You can even move your toolbars or additional windows onto another monitor leaving the maximum amount of room to see your design.

What is more you can have one instance of CADSTAR in one monitor looking at an older version of the SCM/PCB while comparing it with another version in the other monitor or even viewing and comparing Gerbers etc.

I have had multiple instancs of designs open in dual screens many times while checking and confirming differences that easily made it a worthwhile investment quickly paying for itself in time saved switching between windows one one screen.

Or even better go for three monitors and have schematic, PCB and some design spec showing or even just your email program.

If your video card drivers do not support it then you can get utilities that will give you multiple monitor support and a task bar in each one that shows the individual windows for each monitor.
Ultramon is the one I prefer to use.

Modern laptops can dual screen too and I would not even dream of PCB design on a single monitor any more, why do you?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi!
how can I configure Cadstar to work with two monitors? I tried moving schematic window to the second monitor but it doesn't let me open it there. Is there any special configuration?
Thanks!

MattyLad said...

Don't try and use CADSTAR over 2 monitors, use 2 instances of CADSTAR, one per monitor.

You can use the windows keys to swap monitor (win+arrow) etc.

If you need to turn cross probe to "others" on.

Anonymous said...

Got it!
Thank you!

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