NineDotConnects delivers monthly technical webinars with topics that are intended to help our electrical engineering community. We also provide videos for EDA tools that we resell or support such as SOLIDWORKS PCB, Altium Designer, Cadence OrCAD Allegro, Desktop EDA, DownStream Technologies, and Zuken E3. If you like more information, please check out our website - ninedotconnects.com.
That's cool, but where is the 3D wire model integration for your 3D cad software (like SolidWorks) that was announced 8 months ago? When will this game-changing feature be implemented?
I am glad you found our video useful. We strive to provide our knowledge in electronics through our videos for free. I understand the audio quality isn't great. It was recorded in 2016. The recording platform we use today has gotten better. We provide closed caption so that people can follow along better.
Hi, where to find the wire library in Altium Designer Pro? Under "All components", I don't see any "Harness" library. Do we have to create it manually?
Unfortunately, you will have to create your own library. However, there may be some part choices that you can pull into the component to help populate the parameters.
@NineDotConnects So the title must be corrected to something like "Altium Designer Pro/Ent Constraint Manager" since that feature is not part of the standard AD.
The purpose of putting the book online is to allow people from all over the world the opportunity to "read" the book free of charge while at the same time, trying to protect our IP. We have gotten dozens of requests for free copies of the book internationally; however, the printing and shipping to many of these places is not trivial or cheap. As for the author's narrations, we went with the AI voice to ensure that every word was pronounced correctly, without accent, and at a speed that would allow those who are not strong in the English language a chance to absorb the information. We also added captions at the bottom to ensure that the PCB jargon was not mistranslated by RU-vid's CC system. BTW - For native English speakers, run the video at 1.5X.
This guy took way too many coffees before giving this presentation. It is still very informative although sometimes hard to follow due to the speed at which the presenter is going.
We consider our presenter to be a genius. I guess that comes with some quirks :-). I am sure you can slow down the video speed to better understand. Thanks for watching.
Thank you for the video. I got 8 minutes in, and learned what I needed to learn to do what I was trying to do. This actually works through ICs, much to my surprise. Also, if you select any ambiguous pins along the way (meaning more than one possible path from end to end, such as an alternate path thru a pair of RF switches) it will create the x-signal through the path you select. This is great that this feature is now in and works through ICs, without having to setup models.
Thanks a lot for this contribution. Do you believe that an scripting Code running in Altium would be able to check some dimensions like PCB dimensions, pad dimensions and generate a report based on this. Do you know where I can find further information about scripting in Altium?
There is likely a way to create a script that could check dimensions; however, we advise against such an endeavor. Documentation is difficult to come by. Altium has never pulled together any complete documentation on scripting. More importantly, the changes that Altium is constantly making to their versions (both minor and major) can easily break a script. That said, if you are still interested in pursuing scripting in Altium, we encourage you to contact Randy Clemmons. He posts videos regarding his product called Parts and is well-versed in the idiosyncrasies of Altium Designer.
Thank you for video! Please say where is possible to download additional libraries like you have in the video. And please, give a link to the video where you explain how to work with new item in the library.
Thank you for your inquiry. Unlike our webinars, these "brief" videos were not archived. Videos like this one were usually done "on the fly" to capture knowledge that we thought would be pertinent to our customers. Therefore, the chances are slim to none that we will find the files used for this video. Please continue to build upon your knowledge via the E3 website and other E3 videos that have been posted.
The output panel is an archaic panel that is primarily used to show SVN messages. It was also used to show messages when using Altium Designer to interface with Tasking products. It would make sense to output items to this panel via scripting; however, it is something that we have not looked into.
The topic of using a dark or black background for the Altium Designer schematic editor has been requested for quite some time. There was a feature request for this on Altium.com. At this time, it cannot be voted on. However, it has been brought up. Note you must have an Altium account in order to see this page: bugcrunch.live.altium.com/#/idea/8113 It is not difficult to change the background. This can be done in the preferences. However, the color of some of the primitives is not controlled by the user. When using a dark background, you need to have a contrasting color for it to be seen.
The most worthwhile part of this presentation is from the 27 minute mark forward, where the development and use of printed circuit boards is covered. The history of PCBs tends to get little mention. It is essential and groundbreaking technology. I will say that the introductory history is better covered a lot of other places. Instead, you might have concentrated on how electrical components were mounted and connected before printed circuit boards. There were lots of tube mounted chassis and mixed electronics mountings, often wired underneath. Access to components and heat dissipation was a concern. As was, keeping your wiring clear of very hot components, and segregating high voltage wiring. A glaring omission in these sort of presentations is the early 60s development of IBM's solid logic SLT technology. It was developed in the late 50s just ahead of the first ICs. For a little over a decade it proved to be much more reliable than the first, rather finicky, first-generation germanium based IC circuits. IBM's mounting technology was also a major step forward in the era of discrete transistors.
Thanks for great video, I try to import DXF format but altium program did'nt work correctly. Can you show step->dxf file, or can you share some libraries to test my program ? File downloaded from traceparts is very big and I can not open altium library.
In reviewing the video (31:33), the DXF/DWG import dialog does not provide the ability to select which DXF/DWG file format to use. Oddly, this is available in the DXF/DWG import tool in the PCB editor, so it is not understood why Altium did not include this in the schematic DXF/DWG import tool. Unfortunately, Importing DXF/DWG files requires some trial and error since the formats were never formally defined. For reference, we have had good success with DXF/DWG imported from SOLIDWORKS and 3D Content Central (which happens to be owned by Dassault Systems, the parent company of SOLIDWORKS.) Recommendation 1: If you can access the program generating the DXF/DWG file, try setting the format version to “2000”. Recommendation 2: Try to import the DXF/DWG file into the PCB editor. Once you have it imported as expected, save that result at a DXF/DWG export. Then open the schlib file and try importing the Altium exported DXF/DWG file. We wish we could be more definitive with our response. If you do figure it out, please post!
Thank you for teach us that. I have a project in Altium where I want import Test Points from another project. Is there a video where you already explainded that?
I am glad you enjoyed watching the "Unique Id's in Altium Designer." We posted a video on Test Points. Please check it out - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XRLzlKkUg48.html.
Altium has very useful funtion called port cross refrence,whihc can show the location of the ports,but in my work time,I usuaully use netlabel and I want the netlabel can also be automatlly be noted with the location,can the script do the job?
A script could do what you want; however, I would not go down that path since each version with Altium seems to impact some aspect of the scripting language, which could break the code when you bump to a newer version.
Thank you for your question. We are not going to pursue a new video on Altium scripting for several reasons, with the primary reason being that with every revision change, something changes in the scripting language, which will likely break your script. Secondly, documentation is difficult to come by and incomplete, and what is out there is not necessarily easy to understand unless you have a solid background in object-oriented languages. When we at Nine Dot Connects have to code, we do as much as possible outside of the Altium Designer environment. If we need to extract data, we do so through Altium’s Nexar.
Thank you very much for these great webinars. I have learned such great amount of concept that i couldn't have learned in such a good way in my entire life without your webinars.
When i watched the first part of the webinar, i thought that there would never be a better webinar than the first webinar, but i found a better one in the second part. Thank you very much for sharing this priceless material with the world. I am looking forward to watched the third one. What exactly i am going to do now.
Hello, I would like to ask how to connect svndatabase and access. After I connect, the device has no symbol and footprint. And I enabled SVN in the settings, and set the storage path.
Thanks, Nine Dot. Another fine webinar. I wonder how robust the data security is in all of these Altium processes where the Altium application is inviting the user to look up components and their attributes at manufacturers' and suppliers' web sites through their tool? Confidentiality would rely on Altium's and all of the 3rd parties' security features being solid. In the most simple example, requiring all connections be from https web interfaces, and so on.
When you use these features, you really do not know what they are collecting. But, if they are collecting data, it is library related. If you look at enough libraries (like we do), it can give you a glimpse of what a company uses in their designs; but the library does not tell you how a component is being implemented or where that component is used. If Altium really wanted to extract that kind of data, they could easily do it via their A365 servers. In short, yes, there may be data collected because Altium is trying to build up their library collection and the suppliers want to know what designers are looking for. We would be hard-pressed to believe that there is something nefarious going on.
@@NineDotConnects I don't suspect Altium or the suppliers of nefarious efforts, I'm thinking in terms of a 4th party (parties), being able to track any web requests going through the tool to Altium and then on to the suppliers. If these aren't encrypted (https vs http) then they're vulnerable to "sniffing" as a designer builds out their entire BOM with such a tool.
I'm aware that this is free content, but would it be possible in the future to re-upload this webinar series with better audio quality? It's a shame that such a good education material is slightly ruined due to scuffed audio. Else, followed both parts and have to say, it's fantastic!
I agree with you regarding the audio quality and we will re-upload with better audio if needed and we are able. However, in this case, we can’t do anything about it since the presenter cannot redo the audio. Thank you for your input.
