Manufacturing Documentation with Duane Benson

Learn how to work in NC Editor mode with a CAM document in Altium Designer's CAMtastic editor, from converting circular flashes into drill points and changing drill tools, to generating a drill layer from Gerber data. This article also explains how to place drill points, circles, slots, and text, and add drill points to rout plunge points, with guidance on active layers and tool definitions. Keep…

Altium Designer’s CAMtastic editor includes reports for fabrication quotations, drill tools, Dcode and layer usage, design rule violations, netlists, routing and milling paths, and selected objects’ XY coordinates. This article explains how to access these reports from the Reports menu, configure the required options, and understand key prerequisites and file-saving behavior. Keep reading to…

Explore the Analysis tools in Altium Designer’s CAMtastic editor for checking and working with your CAM document. This article explains how to configure design rule checks, review violations and apply available fixes, locate invalid polygons, create fabrication drawings from drill layers, and fill, clean, or generate boundaries. It also introduces query commands for inspecting CAM objects. Keep…

Explore the additional tools in Altium Designer’s CAMtastic editor for calculating copper area, placing copper pours, removing isolated and stacked pads, resizing objects, adding teardrops, and trimming silkscreen. This article explains the steps, settings, and prerequisites for these operations, helping you understand how to apply them to your CAM documents. Keep reading to put these practical…

Altium Designer’s CAMtastic editor provides tools to import PCB fabrication data, check layer assignments and stack-up, extract a netlist, and run design rule checks to identify potential fabrication issues. This article walks you through the verification workflow, including reviewing violations, investigating affected objects, and applying Auto Fix where available. Read on to put these tools to…

Learn how to manage layers in an Altium Designer CAM document, from adding and aligning layers to copying objects, moving layer data, merging layers, and adjusting X and Y scaling. This article also explains how to create composite layers, control their polarity and compilation order, and explode them for layer-level editing. Keep reading to put these layer-management commands to work in your CAM…

Learn how to place and edit CAM objects in Altium Designer’s CAMtastic editor, from cutting and copying between documents to creating multiple copies, clearing, mirroring, moving, and rotating objects. This guide explains the selection tools, reference points, and clipboard restrictions that govern these operations. Keep reading to put these techniques to work with greater confidence. -…

Get familiar with the tools for viewing and navigating a CAM document in Altium Designer. This article explains how to zoom and pan, control layer visibility and drawing order, compare layers, and adjust the display of document elements using menu commands and keyboard shortcuts. Keep reading to take more confident control of your CAM document view. - Learn navigation commands for focusing on…

Get familiar with the keyboard shortcuts and drag-and-drop actions available in Altium Designer’s Output Job editor. This quick reference covers editing outputs, configuring their settings, linking them to output containers or print jobs, and generating enabled outputs. Read on to put these shortcuts to work in your next Output Job file. - Learn how to cut, copy, paste, delete, and duplicate…

Include non-native Altium Designer files in your project outputs using the PostProcess output type. This article explains how to add a PostProcess output to an Output Job file, configure the files to copy, and build source paths with macros and file filters. It also covers options for including subfolders and preserving the source folder structure when copying files to the configured Folder…