Altium Designer 20 Installation

This is an Altium Designer 20 installation guideline from the beginning to the end.

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Electronic Design Process in Altium Designer

Since its introduction in 2002, many designers have adopted Altium Designer worldwide for their PCB design needs, from independent contractors and small businesses to major corporations such as Siemens, Texas Instruments, and SpaceX. Regardless of the size of the company, the number of designers working on the project, or the complexity of the design, Altium Designer provides the tools and capabilities necessary to move the design from conception to manufacturing.

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Navigating Altium Designer 20

Just as pilots rely on equipment and skills to navigate through the airspace, engineers and designers must navigate PCB designs with similar dexterity. In this webinar, we'll be looking at some of the navigation tools Altium Designer provides, including:

• File Navigation in the Projects Panel
  

• Menu Bars, Shortcuts, and Hotkeys
  

• Use of Panels
  

• Selection Tools and Functions
  

• Navigator Panel in the Schematic Editor
  

• Cross Probe and Cross Select
  

• View Configuration Panel
  

• PCB Panel in the PCB
  

• 3D Mode Navigation and Uses
  

This video is a must-see for anyone who needs to view or review designs in Altium Designer.

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Navigating Altium Designer 16

What about the rest of us who need to look at our colleagues' handy work in Altium Designer? We will focus on that in this webinar - How to navigate Altium.

Topics include:

• The importance of file extensions and their meanings
  

• The critical panels for navigation and where to find them
  

• Ways to zoom, pan, and navigate the tool in both the schematic and PCB layouts
  

• How to open and view files that are under version control
  

A must-see for anyone tired of running to an Altium literate colleague to explore the project's design work.

Q&A's from Webinar

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Spelunking in the Altium Schematic Preferences - Part 1

What's interesting about Altium Designer's preferences is providing options and flexibility, making the tool more custom to the user.

However, many of us do not go spelunking in the preferences because we do not feel we entirely command the tool or accept the default settings. This defeats the purpose of the preferences!!

It dawned on us at Nine Dots that the preferences are a powerful Altium Designer feature but are generally overlooked. We also realized that showing all the preferences in 1 hour would not allow us to cover them adequately. In this webinar, our focus will be specific to schematic preferences. We intend to demonstrate and explain all of these schematic preferences.

We covered the following topics, and feel free to download the preference sheets that we showcased during the webinar:

• General
  

• Grids
  

• Break Wire
  

• Default Units
  

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Spelunking in the Altium Schematic Preferences - Part 2

In Part 1, we began our exploration of the Altium Designer schematics preferences. This included a thorough look at the General, Grids, Break Wire, and Default Units pages. This month we will look at the following schematic preference pages in detail:

• Graphical Editing
  

• Compiler
  

• AutoFocus
  

• Library Autozoom
  

• Default Primitive Pages
  

We have made the files we used for the presentation available for download. Click here to gain access to them.

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SOLIDWORKS PCB, Altium Designer, and the Big Picture

Any software package that has longevity goes through a fantastic evolution. For example, Microsoft Word has progressed from a word-processing tool to a suite completely capable of formatting a book for publication. Intuit's Quicken went from passive computerized accounting sheets to a financial system that can actively participate in financial transactions. When one thinks about it, any tool you have used for years has added features and abilities to make life a little easier or more productive.

But jumping into a fully grown and mature product can be daunting and intimidating if you're new to the tool. There are so many buttons, options, and manuals that run 300+ pages. Sometimes one wishes that the bells and whistles could be set aside to focus on the core capabilities that make the tool great.

Fortunately, when it comes to Altium Designer, there is such a tool. Developed jointly by SOLIDWORKS and Altium Inc, SOLIDWORKS PCB was designed for those designers and engineers who want the power of Altium Designer's core capabilities and the added benefits of seamless MCAD-ECAD collaboration.

We will introduce SOLIDWORKS PCB (affectionately "SWPCB") and discuss the use models each represents.

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UI Color Change

You will quickly learn how to change the UI (User Interface) color in Altium Designer 18 and newer versions.

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A Brief Overview of the Workspace Panels

Panels are widely used in Altium Designer. In Altium Designer 18, many dialog boxes were converted to panels. This video provides a brief overview of the ways the panels can be configured.

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PCB Layout Copy Reference

This video explains the reference prompt when using a copy or cut function in the PCB layout editor. This video will also explain how to enable the reference feature in the schematic editor as well.

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