You’ll find that most programs have all the features you’re looking for, so the ease-of-use factor is most strongly considered. This is important for team collaboration when the engineer’s skills are scaled to larger, wide-spread applications.įinally, we consider the various feature sets and which programs are better for which applications.
Diptrace pcb design tutorial software#
Stephan’s easiness metric, the software should be a standard and widely used platform in the industry. When you have to click 5 times, move the mouse 5cm to the right and 4cm to the left to do a simple thing, and you have to do this simple thing one hundred times on your PCB. Why? Well because a good portion of the time you spend routing your PCB (time is money) is the time taken to perform simple actions. “A PCB routing software should be easy to use.To define that subjective criteria, I'd like to propose here a simple 'easiness measurement metric' defined as number of clicks + number of keystrokes + mouse moving distance to perform a given function. Cadence article to encompass our primary grading criteria: We really like this excerpt from Mathieu Stephan’s (AKA limpkin) excellent Altium vs. We also have biases for software that we’re extremely comfortable with compared to programs that we have had very little work with. It’s important to establish the criteria we’re using - which is, inevitably, subjective. This guide is structured to help you decide which is optimal or explore alternatives. Ultimately, your needs and preferences should drive what CAD program you use.
Diptrace pcb design tutorial free#
They range from free or inexpensive to high-end/premium.Īll of the tools are different and unique in their own way. You can get my “production version” PCB file, which has a grid fill for the pour, as well as some other tweaks to pass Olimex fab requirements.There are several programs available that range from simple and intuitive to highly sophisticated. I chose a solid fill and to remove unconnected islands of copper. The final video shows how I add a copper pour on the bottom layer.
Towards the end, I also make one more tweak so the crystal caps have square pads for positive terminals (it just looks slightly better even though ceramic capacitors are not polarized :) If you look carefully through the video, you’ll notice that I still had the crystal capacitors turned the wrong way, and at 3:06 the software asks if I really want to merge two nets that were previously unconnected. Note that “T” and “B” keys toggle between top and bottom signal layer!Īs you can see, I configured the trace options so that VCC trace is a bit thicker – GND is a smaller issue, as I’m using ground copper pour which should fix that later on. I Before routing, I tweak the component locations a bit, and make the header holes and pads slightly larger (square header pins require slightly larger holes than normal through-hole components). After some head-scratching, I managed to figure out a way to avoid vias completely, and this is what I use here. DipTrace has an autoroute option, but it doesn’t do as good job as a human would – I tried it and while it worked OK, it had to make one or two vias (metal-filled holes that go through the PCB to enable a trace to go from one side to another outside the component mounting holes). The most important and many times the hardest part of the PCB design is routing. DipTrace also has an excellent “Replace pattern” option that lets me change the pattern used for a given component, which I used to replace crystal capacitor patterns with one that takes up less space on silk screen (the distance between pads stays the same, though). Sorry for that! However, I trust you’ll be able to find the correct option yourself if you look at the window that then pops up – usually it’s “xxx properties”, like component or pad properties that I open.Īfter getting the components more or less to their correct locations, I then draw a board outline (after adjusting the grid to a slightly fines 2.5 mil pitch). You probably notice that at some points of the video, the popup-menu options go outside the recording area. Spacebar is again used to rotate components 90 degrees, and multiple items can be selected with ctrl+click.
I then remove some component names which are not sorely needed, and change the location for the remaining ones to the center of the component. I then proceed arrange the components roughly to final layout, and add two 10-pin headers which will plug into breadboard. Like it’s schematic counterpart, also this tool is quite easy to use.įirst I change the grid to 5 mil so each step is half of the 10 mil breadboard hole spacing. In DipTrace Schematic Editor, I used File->Convert to PCB (CTRL-B) to get the components and connections exported to PCB Layout tool. Continuing from part 1 of this ATtiny2313 breadboard header with DipTrace -tutorial, I’ll now go through the PCB design.
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