Our tireless engineering team has rolled out some gigantic features in Upverter. Don’t miss any. Try them out today!

1. Work unhindered on your active layer by making the rest of your board translucent

All the elements on your active layer will turn opaque, letting you clearly see where everything needs to go. Seeing your design as a translucent stack will also let you know what else is on the other layers, avoiding errors down the road.

The translucent effect will automatically take place when you select the desired layer from the Layers menu on the right-hand panel of the PCB Layout editor. You can also specify your active layer using the number keys: 1 for Top Copper, 2 for the next layer down, etc.

2. Selection Filtering

PCBs can get pretty crowded. Often times, a number of different things–part, trace, pad, pour, are stacked together, making it frustrating to select the thing that you need.

Using the Select and Move tool (keyboard shortcut “esc”), click on Filters to pull up a check list of all the different elements on the canvas. If you’re working with just one thing, leave the rest of the list unchecked and you’re good to go!

And even if you don’t use filters, you can still specify what you’re selecting straight in the editor: when you left-click on a stack, a tiny menu will pop up, prompting you to choose what you’d like to select. Neat, right?

3. Guided Routing

Specify your design’s copper-to-copper clearance and have our tool warn you of any violations while you route your trace!

Double-click on a trace to open up the Trace Inspector. From there, you can click on a Trace Class and type in the clearance that you need in Mil:

When you go back to the editor to route your trace, a green outline will show, letting you see what the clearance would look like on your board. If you route too close to another copper element, the outline will turn red:

4. Blind and Buried Vias

Upverter’s via options have expanded beyond through-holes to include blind and buried vias! For designs that value board real estate, this feature upgrade will save you a lot of headache.

Pull up the New Via menu by using the keyboard shortcut “V”.

You’ll be able to create blind and buried vias by specifying the start and end layers. On the canvas, the different types of vias will look like this (left to right: Throughhole, Blind, Buried):

5. Keepouts

Keepouts are really great for any antenna project. Our Path tool from the left-hand toolbar now lets you define a region of your board where you need a specific clearance. You can draw Keepouts in any shape and size!

Pull up the Path Inspector by double-clicking on the path you’ve drawn. From here, you can specify the exact locations of the vertices (for the more obsessive compulsive).

We have loads more features to announce in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned!