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Please start a post in the #hw-onboarding forum pinging @Hardware Lead indicating that you’d like to start your onboarding process! Include the email you would like to have associated with your Altium account, or the email you already have associated with an account. If you do not yet have an Altium account, do not create one by yourself. We will create an account for you with access to the team licenses. Otherwise, you will have to request an educational license on your own.

Once a lead has responded to your message indicating that they have added you to our Altium workspace, you will be able to begin!

Installing Altium

[Coming Soon! Hopefully covered in HW101.]

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.

Project

You will be creating a board out of the simple “battery tester” circuit that you’ve seen in Hardware 101. When powered off a 12V source, a battery can be connected to see if it is between 10V and 15V. If it is not, an indicator light will illuminate to show the error.

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).

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