I'm not sure exactly how long manual length matching takes per project, but I'd rather do that than deal with the piss poor UI Altium has. The only reason why you would pick Altium is if it saved you time. Pretty much everything in Altium is hidden in a menu, where DipTrace keeps it all in a convenient place. Yeah you can do some shortcuts, but the UI sucks so bad, that any time you'd save gets eaten up dealing with their poor design choices. After using Altium for a month, I really am not interested in using their software. I've been using DipTrace for 3 years and love it to death. I think that you have to manually calculate your capacitance from your trace width, but that can be done via a PCB trace calculator. Have a nice day, Robert FeranecĬan't you specify a minimum and a maximum length of a trace in the Net Classes in the PCB Layout Editor? I've never had to use this feature, but it is there. It's explained in the Advanced Hardware Design. Once you specify the exact component you would like to use, you simply generate BOM (press one click) with all this information and anyone can order the components without asking you any questions - doesnt depend if there is 10 or 100 or 1000 components. ![]() If you don't specify it, you will be getting a lot of emails from your purchasing department and from suppliers to confirm, that the components they selected are correct. ![]() Imagine you have a board with 2000 components, 400 types of components, with a lot of resistors and capacitors, and you would have to manually specify every time for every board what is the ordering number of each component. Once you start designing boards professionally, with thousands of components per board and you do a lot of projects it would be very difficult to manage all the BOMs (Bill of materials) for these boards. Quote Dear Emil, Yes, the way you use is fine for small boards and few projects. Altium then let you save just the parts used into a separate library to minimise the RAM required by your computer & to provide you a small file to save alongside your schematic & pcb files. So, Altium had have to resort to users installing (say) 15 or 20 libraries during the schematic design stage to have access to the schematic & footprint parts. If you opened all the unified libraries at once, your computer would slow to a crawl. ![]() Altium can't do this as they have hundreds of thousands of parts, all with specific part numbers. No need to locate & add the required library to then have access to the one footprint you require. Runs well when it just contains the generic footprints plus a few special ones you have added yourself. ADDED: Target 3001 have a great idea of running all components in one large library. I'm the same as you, preferring the DipTrace way of doing things, but Altium use their unified libraries as a selling point & a way to continually getting their customers to pay for another upgrade. You can select a different footprint "on the fly" when laying out your schematic & this is remembered all the way through to the pcb layout. You will notice in the latest version of DipTrace gives you a generic library containing (for instance) all the TOxxx through hole & SMD parts. By using this method you are guaranteed to also have the correct footprint. Altium expect you to specify a part from a particular manufacturer, search for that part in the extensive libraries using the full part number, select it & place it into your schematic. The approach that Altium has taken for many years now is to provide you with an extensive set of "unified libraries". If you don't do this & later invoke the command to update all components from the library, you will end up with the generic (standard) footprint for that schematic part for all your capacitors (& resistors). ![]() I have not watched the video but suspect it is because a different footprint was used for each capacitor (& each resistor).
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