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KiCAD EDA

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Migrate from KiCAD EDA to Altium Designer Compare Altium Designer vs. KiCAD EDA

Real-Time Manufacturing Feedback in the MacroFab Platform - AltiumLive 2022 In this video, Joey Rodriguez will tackle the MacroFab platform's tools to show the impact of each design decision on the final manufacturing cost for a product at any volume. Watch Video

Part 2: Why Your PCB Design Review Process Is Obsolete and What You Can Do About It

Part 2: Why Your PCB Design Review Process Is Obsolete and What You Can Do About It As we established in Part 1, the PCB design review and collaboration practices have room for improvement in many organizations. To address this, we developed Altium 365. Let's examine how running a PCB project through Altium 365 compares to other methods. One source of truth, visibility, and version control To start using Altium 365, you need to create a workspace and a centralized location for your design files, libraries, and collaboration Read Article

2020 Holiday Gift Ideas for Your Favorite Engineer

2020 Holiday Gift Ideas for An Engineer Check out our list of the best holiday gifts for engineers in 2020. Read Article

Moving to Altium Designer from KiCad Making a Smooth Transition to Altium Designer from KiCad Layout In this guide, we’ll focus on importing KiCad Layout PCB designs. Please refer to specific guides if you need to migrate other files. Legacy Translation Before You Begin This guide will show you how to import data from your legacy system into Altium Designer. Before importing all of your legacy data, it’s important to ask yourself, “why do I need to import my legacy data?” Below are Read Article

Stay Productive When You Switch to Altium Designer

Upgrade from AutoCAD PCB Design Software to Altium Designer's Unified Environment Most designers are familiar with AutoCAD electrical PCB design software for mechanical or construction drafting, and for making important engineering diagrams. AutoCAD PCB design is great for many tasks involved in electrical or mechanical engineering, but PCB designers need more than mechanical drafting tools to make advanced electronics. To get your designs to the next level, you need the best set of ECAD tools on the market, rather than using Read Article

Make the Free Switch and Import from KiCad to Altium Designer

Make the Free Switch and Import from KiCad to Altium Designer Free PCB design software can be a great thing, especially when you’re just getting started as a new designer or a hobbyist. As you gain more experience and you start working with more complex products or in a professional setting you’ll start to find that each KiCad and Altium Designer software tools have nuances, but there is only one that focuses on productivity for professional hardware engineers. If you have serious time constraints you want Read Article

Increase Your Productivity with Streamlined Design Tools

How to Make a DXF File a Different Format With Altium Designer Considering switching to new design software? Wondering how to make a DXF file? Tired of working in a command line interface just to complete simple design tasks? Instead of using an antiquated workflow, Altium Designer makes using your CAD, data management, analysis, and deliverable generation tools easy. Altium Designer also gives you access to file formats from your other design and CAD programs. You’ll be able to use DXF format, SCH, ODB++ Read Article

Commodore 128 Principal Engineer, Bil Herd on Best Practices for Learning a New CAD Tool

Commodore 128 Principal Engineer, Bil Herd on Best Practices for Learning a New CAD Tool Curious about the early days of Early Home Computer Design? Former Commodore 128 Principal Engineer, Bil Herd shares stories from his illustrious career and Best Practices for Learning a New CAD Tool. Read Article

First Impressions Migrating to Altium Designer 18

First Impressions Migrating to Altium Designer 18 Updating a software package is risky business – and not just because of new bugs that could be added. It’s also possible that a perfectly working new feature looks like a bug from the perspective of your workflow. I’ve recently upgraded to Altium Designer^® (AD18) and released a new design with it, finding a few nuances. And not just the new color scheme (FYI: AD18 doesn’t support the legacy skin colors, but may in future versions). Overall, the Read Article

James MacKinnon’s Career Path to NASA

James MacKinnon’s Career Path to NASA Judy Warner: James, please share a little bit about your academic background and how you learned to design PCBs. James MacKinnon: In my junior and senior year at the University of Florida I had some classes where we were required to do some fairly simple PCB design. Basically, if you don't pass those classes, then you don't graduate. And since it's an EE-type class, they want you to create a PCB. They were simple circuits for junior design Read Article

Import Wizard

PCB Importers: Import Wizard One task that has always proven difficult is moving electronic product designs from one design environment to another. Whether you’ve changed design tools or acquired designs from another company, there are a number of challenges involved in moving a project from one software platform to another, while maintaining design consistency. It’s a difficult and time-consuming process, but it has to be done. INTRODUCTION If a PCB designer has a design in Read Article