Altium

Altium is an industry-standard CAD software for PCB design.

Quick links:

• Stable documentation

Projects

Altium groups design files together in projects. To add new files, we can right click and press Add New to Project > Schematic. There’ll be multiple pre-defined sheet templates.

There’s a built in version control system within Altium for whenever we save projects that function online. To store projects online (on Altium 365 or Git), we should select the Make Project Available Online option, which lets us share projects.

Keybinds

To navigate around:

• To pan across the board, press right click.
  • On trackpad, scrolling in the $y$-direction moves in the $y$-direction.
• To zoom in and out, use the scroll wheel.
• To switch between layers, press *. To go backwards, press Ctrl + *.
• To highlight a net, hold Ctrl and press it.

To edit components:

• While a component is hovering with your cursor, rotate it with Space.
• To pause the editor, press Tab. To unpause, press Esc.

To access tools:

• To route a net, press Ctrl + W.
• To measure distance, press Ctrl + M.

To undo some unanticipated actions:

• Shift + C de-highlights nets.