Lately we’ve all been sitting quietly hunched over our respective terminals wading about deep in the fetid, but oh-so-powerful, bowels of Altium. For those who don’t know about Altium, it is a program developed specifically to develop electronic circuits and take it all the way from sketching out a circuit to printed circuit board development and through to manufacturing considerations and bill-of-material exporting. Before this, we were using Diptrace, which, frankly, was a lot more intuitive to use but not nearly as extensive. But it’s also this very extensiveness of Altium that has led us each to headaches. Altium has so many layers and so many functions and so many command dialogues that it is difficult to jump in. Even though we’ve been working with the Altium Wiki or tutorial files open, we’re still running our heads into walls of frustration. We’ve yet to figure out how to set constraints on the PCB auto-routing feature or how to get wires to move with their assigned pins in schematic mode, but at this point we’re annoyed enough and have spent too much time to just walk away from the program and back into the squishy arms of Diptrace. I mean, even their technical support interface is strangely complicated, which makes me suspect that it was designed by a civil engineer.

However, we’re coming into the curve. We’ve managed to design a couple circuits with multiple ICs in schematic mode, and we’re quickly figuring out how to route the traces on the PCB manually. Bilal has designed us a new business card, although he has been tinkering with the PCB layout for about 14h now, and Andrew is working on a new digital signal processing module while I am building better 3D models of our components in Autodesk Inventor. Eventually, once we figure out the idiosyncrasies and nuances; Altium will become a fluid and valuable asset to us, especially since we’ve been mounting our component libraries in our server cloud for remote access. It seems there is good reason Altium offers training classes on its software, but we maintain that the best way to learn is to just go and do it.

One Response to “Electronics Library”

1. Laen says:

   August 9, 2010 at 4:38 pm

   Man, I’d love a quick little tutorial that follows an actual design in Altium. I keep hearing great things about it, but their online tutorials kind of jump around (not following a specific, simple design), and I’m having a hard time following it.

   What I _really_ want is the Sparkfun Eagle tutorials converted to Altium.