First, let’s look at redefining the board outline. You can redefine, edit, modify, and move it. The design menu gives you a number of options for working on your board outline. The Design pulldown menu in Altium Designer
To use them, remember that you must be in the (green) Board Planning Mode. There are also other board editing commands in this menu, as you can see in the picture below. In the previous section, we used the Design pulldown menu to access the Edit Board Shape command.
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So far, we’ve shown you how to edit the existing default board outline in an Altium Designer Printed Circuit Board, but there is so much more possible. Changing Board Sizes in Altium Designer and Other Features When you are finished moving the board corners and edges to their desired locations, click outside the board outline to exit the edit mode. Once we click there, that will become the new location for that corner of the board outline.
You can see in the picture above that we have grabbed the upper left editing handle of the Test board outline and pulled it down and to the right. Moving a corner while editing the board outline You can change the size and shape of the board outline by grabbing one of those handles and dragging it to a new location, or by grabbing an edge of the board and dragging it. Once you are in this command you will see the editing handles around the board outline. To do this, you will use the Design > Edit Board Shape pulldown menu command. Now you are ready to change PCB board size of the existing board outline in your design session. Setting the board planning mode in Altium Designer In our Test design, entering the board planning mode turns the board outline to a green color which you can also see below. You can enter the board planning mode by using the menu selection as shown in the picture below, or by clicking in the board and pressing “1”. Altium Designer has three modes for working with the design: To work with your board outline you must first put Altium Designer into the Board Planning Mode. In addition to setting the value and units of your grid, you will also find many other useful functions in the grid manager. You can do this by using the using the shortcut key of CNTR > Shift > G, or by going to the grid manager in the properties menu of the board. On the right side of the picture above, you can see that we’ve set up our origin in the bottom left corner of the board outline. Now click your mouse button to set the origin. The first step will be to set the origin by going to Edit > Origin > Set as you can see on the left side of the picture below. Often times you can use that board outline and modify it according to your needs as we will do here. With the PCB created in your project, you are now ready to start working on your board outline.Ĭreating a new PCB in Altium Designer Creating a Simple Board OutlineĪltium Designer opens with a default PCB size of 6-inches by 4-inches in a rectangular board outline (when you create a new PCB object). You will be prompted for a name and for the purpose of this article we gave our PCB the name of “Test”. To do that, you will go to File > New > PCB as you can see in the picture below. Next, you need to have a blank PCB ready to work with in your Altium Designer layout. You can find some very useful information on that by looking at this concise document from Altium Designer on the makeup of printed circuit boards.
In more flexible circumstances, many of the PCB design technologies will directly affect the optimal board shape. We won’t spend time on that process as that is usually dictated by the needs of the design or your company. The first thing that you will want to do is to figure out what PCB size and shape your board needs to be. Here we will take a look at a basic layout guide for creating and changing PCB board sizes in Altium Designer ®. The design tools from Altium Designer are particularly well suited for this task and have a lot of options and features to help you. Round boards, square boards, boards with notches and cutouts in them, boards with odd angle corners, and boards with multiple corners and contours.Ī list of all the possible different shapes and sizes for PCBs would be endless, but you should know fundamental design rule applications to be ready for any of them.įortunately, PCB design tools usually are set up with the drawing utilities that you need to create any board outline that you will come across. If you have been working for a company that only makes boards according to a few standard form factors, then you may not know just how diverse all of the different sizes and shapes can be. It seems like there are as many different circuit board shapes and sizes as there are stars in the sky.
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