To move a part that has been placed you can do the following: If you were to drag that same rectangle from right to left, the entire part would be selected. You would drag the rectangle from left to right so that it encompasses the designator but not all of the rest of the part. This is extremely useful if you want to select just the designator of a part for editing. You can also use the mouse to drag a rectangle around the part, but there are two different ways to select objects by dragging a rectangle.īy dragging your rectangle from the left to the right, you will only select those items that fall in the rectangle, while dragging your rectangle from the right to the left will select all objects that the rectangle touches. To select the part, click the left mouse button inside of the part. Once you have parts on the sheet, you may want to select them for other operations such as changing their properties or other edits. Selecting PCB Components in an Altium Designer Schematic Once you have flown the part into position, click the mouse button or use the Enter key to place the part down on the sheet. While editing the properties, the placement of the part will be paused until you use the Enter key to finalize your property changes.Ĭhanging the value of the designator property This will allow you to change its values as you can see in the picture below where I have entered a new designator value. While the part is flying on your cursor you can edit its properties by pressing the Tab key. Any of these actions will put the part on your cursor so that you can fly it into the design as shown below. From here, you can also drag and drop the part from the Libraries Panel or right click on the part and select “Place.” You can also select the part in the panel and then click the “Place” button at the top of the panel, or you can double click on the part. When working from the Libraries Panel, you will be working with libraries that you have attached to your design. Selecting a component to place on the schematic in Altium Designer You can also right click on the part that you want and select “Place” as you can see in the picture below. When working from the Explorer Panel you can hold your left mouse button down on the part in the Explorer Panel and then drag it over to the schematic sheet. The Explorer Panel allows you to connect to external libraries that are online to find parts. When placing a component you are going to be working from either the Explorer Panel or the Libraries Panel. Now that you’ve done all of this, you are ready to start working with the components on your design. You also have the ability to pull components in from attached libraries or that you connect to through online services. You can create these as single part symbols or as multiple part symbols. Altium Designer also gives you the ability to create symbols both manually and automatically. These are all the basic steps of setting up your schematic for use. The next step is to attach some libraries so that you can search for and find the components that you want to use. You should have also already set the schematic up for size and grids, as well as your preferences too. Let’s assume that you’ve already created your project in Altium Designer and you’ve added a schematic object to it. If you have been avoiding some of these functions because you didn’t know about them, had forgotten them, or didn’t know the shortcut for them hopefully this will be helpful to you.
I’m going to describe some of the more basic schematic component placement functions in Altium Designer along with their shortcuts. In that spirit, let’s see if we can help.
ALTIUM DESIGNER 20 LOCKED ITEM HOW TO
Other users may know how to rotate the component using a menu command, but navigating through the menus can be so annoying that they avoid doing it because they don’t know the shortcut. I’ve seen people draw nets all over the place because they didn’t take the time to rotate the 3D model of a component. If you don’t spend much time in the tools, you may not know or remember what you need to do to in order to rotate a part. Take rotating a 3D model of your board shape, for example. The problem though is that we are probably missing out on some great productivity enhancers by not learning more about the tools that we drive. As long as we can run a circuit simulation or get the data and parts on the schematic sheet to connect, that’s normally good enough. As design engineers, we have a lot of things that we do. It’s not surprising that we don’t spend a lot of time enhancing our working knowledge of the CAD tools.
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