The next portion of design documentation revolves around how you define your release package. The importance here is to thoroughly capture all of the needed information to have your design produced organized in a logical and sane manner. Here the lowest level folder are your fabrication files. These are the collection of mechanical files and […]
Month: December 2017
Documenting Your Designs: Project Files
After you’ve designed your board and ordered a prototype the job is only partially done. The design itself needs to be properly documented and stored outside of your standard working directory to ensure data integrity. This way you never accidentally make a change and save over an archieved design. To go along with this, it’s […]
Xilinx ISE Official Support for Windows 10… Sort of
Xilinx has released an installer to run ISE on Windows 10! The downside is that it’s simply a virtual machine running Linux and only supports the Spartan 6 product line. Download from Xilinx’s Website
EAGLE Tip: Detailed Library Examples
To support one of my previous posts I’ve put together some examples on how to build a thoroughly detailed component library in EAGLE. You can always place general components and then attribute them one-by-one. The issue with this is that it simply takes forever. Then if a component goes EOL you have to go through […]
EAGLE Tip: Using Attributes to create hands-off BOMs
When starting out with EAGLE it’s easy to overlook the attribute tool. However, this is crucial when putting together a professional release package and ensuring proper documentation. Attributed paramaters show as collumns and information on a BOM export. Properly adding this information to the component allows for hands-off BOM generation when it comes time to […]
Altium Designer Shortcuts
After using ExpressPCB, EAGLE, Mentor PADs, and OrCAD I’ve found Altium to be above and beyond in usability and horsepower. Below are some useful keyboard shortcuts to get you up and running quickly. PCB Shortcuts Keys Description J L Jump to location Q Switch between metric and imperial units Ctrl + M Measure distance between […]