Subreddit to discuss tips for design / layout / manufacture of Printed Circuit Boards (PCB), including schematic capture, PCB reviews, 3D part models, assembly Links within subreddit: • PCB Info: • (3MB PDF) PCB Assembly Tips: • How to solder:,,,, PCB Manufacturers: •,,, PCB / Schematic / EDA Software: •,,,,,,,. • wikipedia: Gerber File Viewer Software: •,,,,,,.
Wikipedia: •,,,, Basic Electronics: • • • Related SubReddits: •,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,. Long-time Altium peasant here.
(Just paid my annual support 'tax'.) Altium Designer is pricey, but it is quite powerful, and has a lot of great features. What I like is that the UI has plenty of shortcut keys which I've found to be easy to memorize and use. (However, there have been some others that have claimed that the Altium shortcuts were not easy, so YMMV.) Altium's ability to import and export 3D STEP files, and to be able to view boards in 3D have been a great time-saver in being able to see how a board comes together in the context of other parts in the system.
Got a board spacer that mounts on the PCB? Bring that into the design and you can make quick eye-ball checks of whether the components nearby would interfere with the spacer during assembly. Got a mezzanine board that has headers that have to go to a through-the-board Molex receptacle, at a slight angle to the main PCB? The Altium Vault has a number of useful content which alone isn't enough to make buying Altium worthwhile, but if you're on support, having that content can be quite useful in speeding up creating new designs (or at least in enabling the borrowing of footprints and schematic drawings). The supplier-links capabilities make it easy to drag-and-drop key information like manufacturer's name and part number, and the supplier (digikey in my case) part numbers onto the components. The BOM can auto-calculate based on the target build quantity and will even round up to higher pieces counts to take advantage of price breaks.
It recently added 'xsignals' capabilities which makes it easier to lay out timing-critical circuits where length matching between traces within a group of signals is critical (DDR memory signals, PCI, and other high-speed parallel busses). Recently, Element 14 licensed the Altium technology and have come out with CircuitStudio which, on the surface, looks like the schematics and PCB layout capabilities of Altium, without the more enterprisey stuff for managing the design lifecycle. It looks like much of the nice UI elements are intact - so if you don't have legacy data and can start from scratch, this may be a great way to go. UPDATE: Another thing that I really like in Altium - the ability to cut-and-paste data between Altium and Excel to modify object data and to even create new objects.