Please start a post in the #hw-onboarding forum pinging @Hardware Lead indicating that you’d like to start your onboarding process! Include your Waterloo email so we can give you access to our workspace. If you need any help throughout the onboarding process, use this thread to send us a message!
Altium Account
Once you get an invitation to the workspace, there are a few additional steps to get access to a license.
After you accept the invite, the workspace will be open in the browser where you can see all the projects. However at this time you won’t have access to a license to use Altium yet. To get that, click on your profile icon in the top right, and click “My Profile”.
On your profile page, you will have the option to request to join an organization. Scroll down a bit to find “Americas - Midnight Sun Solar Car Team” and put in a request. Once the request is approved, you should be able to log in to the Altium application have have access to an application license.
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 so, a green light will illuminate indicating that it is good.
Creating a new project
In the Altium program:
Create a project by right clicking on the Midnight Sun workspace in the projects panel (usually on the left of the screen)
Set the project name to “<term> <waterloo-userid>”, ie. “F24 f39zhou”
Leave version control checked, and constraint manager unchecked
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:
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.
PCB: The physical design of the circuit board that you are making. Where exact component placement, trace routing, silkscreen labels, etc are defined.
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).