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Overview

Welcome to the hardware at Midnight Sun! This introductory boot camp is a continuation of Hardware 101 [hyperlink] and will go through the basics of our flow for hardware design.

Getting Started

Accounts

No Previous Altium Account

drop uwaterloo email in discord onboarding channel

Existing Altium account

drop account email in your onboarding message

Installing Altium

[downloading, logging in with license, making sure they have workspace access]

Navigating the UI

Most UI elements you will interact with are housed in “Panels”. They are synonymous with windows, you can resize them and drag them around, even off to a second screen. You can select which ones are visible using the panels tab in the bottom right corner.

Creating a new project

In the Altium program:

  1. Create a project by right clicking on the Midnight Sun workspace in the projects panel (usually on the left of the screen)

  2. Set the project name to “<term> <waterloo-userid>”, ie. “F24 f39zhou”

  3. Leave version control checked, and constraint manager unchecked

  4. Under advanced options, click the 3 dots for the folder location and select Projects → Onboarding

The project should now appear in the projects panel! This is a blank project, so we will need to add some files where we will later create the design. Right click the newly created project (.PrjPcb file) in the sidebar and add the following new items to the project:

  1. Schematic: A diagram which shows all the connections between components. It is not a physical representation of the hardware, just a logical representation of what’s connected.

  2. PCB: The physical design of the circuit board that you are making. Where exact component placement, trace routing, silkscreen labels, etc are defined.

  3. ActiveBOM: A bill-of-materials that will be used to generate the files necessary to order the components.

All these files are created with default names. When you click “Save to Server” in the projects window, you’ll be prompted to name the file. Generally we will name it the project name, and any identifiers as needed (if there are multiple schematic pages, for example).

Schematic

The schematic is where you will create the drawing for your circuit with all the logical connections, like what was done in the onboarding activity.

Template

We use templates to keep the page size standard and add in the Midsun title block. With the schematic open, select the B sized template under Page Options, → Formatting → Template. If a larger page is required in other projects, you can switch to the Tabloid template.

While you are in the properties panel, you can verify that the units are set to mils, and that the visible and snap grids are both set to 100mils

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