Creating a custom Altium pick and place file

I recently worked with a customer who had to generate a nonstandard pick and place file because his assembly house was using antiquated equipment and could not accept a standard Altium pick and place file.  I though it might be helpful to show how to use the Bill of Material generator within Altium to create a custom report to meet such needs.

The procedure is quite simple. The first step is to open the Bill of Materials dialog and drag the parameters from the Grouped Columns down to the All Columns to provide a separate line item for each component.

Make sure the option at the bottom of the dialog is checked to Include Parameters From PCB.  

Now uncheck all of the default parameters in the All Columns.

At the bottom of the All Columns parameter list you will find the Printed Board parameters listed to include the component center (in both imperial and metric units), layer, pad 1 reference, footprint reference point (generally the pick point) and rotation.  Check all of these parameters that apply to your custom report.

Note that you can drag the columns into any order in the main body of the report, to present the information in any required format.

By choosing file format in the lower left area of the dialog prior to exporting you will be able to generate this custom pick and place file in a variety of file formats to include the standard CSV.

The Bill of Material generator within Altium is a very powerful report generator that can be used to create a variety of reports to include any parametrics associated with the components of your design.