74 Silicon chip Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au
Draftsman tool
While the Multi-Board and Assembly feature allows the
finished product to be visualised, there is also the Drafts-
man tool to help communicate how the product should
look at various stages of manufacture, and to assist those
involved in manufacturing. It is a way to quickly create
several smart-looking diagrams and tables to help com-
municate the intent of the design.
We tried it out, again using the Stackable LED Christmas
Tree design, and in a few minutes, we were able to create
what can be seen in Fig.10. You would have to agree that
the result looks pretty spiffy!
In use
The change from Altium Designer 18 to Altium Designer
19 is not a big as the step up to Altium Designer 18 was,
from previous versions. Ignoring the added and improved
features, nothing appears to have moved from where we
expected to find it. So workflow is unaffected.
That’s important since you build a lot of “muscle mem-
ory” using software like this long-term and breaking old
habits can take months, and can slow you down initially.
While we ultimately like many of the changes introduced
with AD18, it did take some time to get used to them!
Of course, finding and activating some of the new fea-
tures will involve knowing where to find the setting in the
first place, but a quick web search to figure that out (or the
time taken to read this article) is certainly worth the time
saved by a really useful and time-saving feature like Com-
ponent re-route.
Altium 365
Another tool has been announced in conjunction with
Altium Designer 19 is Altium 365. It is touted as a cloud-
based tool for collaboration, and will also allow access
to projects by stakeholders via a browser, as well as from
within the Altium Designer application.
It appears that Altium 365 will allow people to contrib-
ute to and be updated on projects without needing the full
Altium Designer application.
Users of Altium Designer 18 or older will need to up-
grade to Altium Designer 19 to make use of Altium 365. At
the time of writing, Altium 365 is undergoing beta-testing
and we have not tried using it.The verdict
We have not looked back at Altium Designer 18 since
installing Altium Designer 19. Now that we have settled
into how the newer versions (18 and 19) work compared to
the older versions (17 and older), Altium Designer 19 ap-
pears to provide the small, but useful improvements that
we expect from a newer version.
As noted, some of the new tools appeared to be something
we would not necessarily make use of, but we certainly
can see the utility. These are not useless “bells & whistles”
as you sometimes find in other software. For example, us-
ing the Multi-board Assembly to check how an enclosure
fits would be handy if we did not have the time to wait for
prototypes to be manufactured.
Altium gives the option of installing the two versions
alongside each other, so that if you have any doubts about
how the newer version works, you can always try Altium
Designer 19 on a trial basis. But we think that, like us, you
will be happy to make the switch.
We have installed new versions side-by-side with older
versions in the past, only to find that the old version gath-
ers dust (so to speak), and is eventually removed to save
some storage space.More details?
You’ll find much more information about Altium 10’s many
features (more than we had space for here), free trial software,
etc on Altium’s website: http://www.altium.com.au SCFig.10: this shows some of the representations that can be created using the Draftsman feature. The top layer view and
drill drawing view could be used by the PCB manufacturer to confirm the PCB design and the lower views can be used to
confirm that the final assembly is correct.