ALTIUM Creating a pattern between unions

[electronx]

I have repeating ADC channels in Altium, 8 channels. I created different unions for all channels.  I made an arrangement for the 1. channel. Then, I selected the first channel and the first union and copied the positions and rotations in the pcblist to the other union channels. Thus, I have 8 ADC circuits with the same pattern. Now, my goal is to distribute these unions equally, 4 to the right and 4 to the left from the middle of the PCB. .How can I achieve this?



I used the "align components" and "distribute horizontally option", but it applies it to all components and breaks the pattern.

[tszaboo]

You can do this easily if you assign them into rooms. Easiest is to use channel design. And then you arrange 1 channel, make the room nice rectangular, and then arrange rooms next to each other.
https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/creating-multi-channel-design#displaying-the-designators-on-the-pcb
Unions is not really the right way to do this. You have to go higher in the hierarchy.

[thm_w]

I assume after you do what tszaboo suggested you can run this command: https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/pcb-dlg-arrangeroomsarrange-rooms-ad?version=22

If you don't want to do that, a manual option could be to draw some gridlines then move the unions around. Not as ideal as the above suggestion though.

[ajb]

Yeah, rooms are the way to go for this, and would have saved you some work in the initial placement and routing of the subcircuits.  You can set the overall outline of the rooms to tessellate cleanly at whatever spacing you want and then align them outline-to-outline, but that sometimes requires a bit of care with your grid and component snap settings.  If you have components with mixed metric/imperial spacings, or otherwise off-grid features, you can end up with maddeningly misaligned outlines or components. 

If you don't want to do that, a manual option could be to draw some gridlines then move the unions around.

Along these lines, if you pick a pad within each union to be your reference point, you can snap that pad to each of your grid marks to place the other unions easily and accurately.  You don't necessarily have to draw a whole grid, I often just do diagonal tick marks on a mech layer, and copy those to all of the offsets I want.