From the course: Learning Altium

Start a new Altium project - Altium Designer Tutorial

From the course: Learning Altium

Start my 1-month free trial

Start a new Altium project

“

- [Man] So let's take a look at creating our very first project with Altium Designer. It's a very simple process, all I have to do is just navigate up to the File Dropdown here, and go to New, Project, and PCB Project. So notice this doesn't open anything up in my main design window, but if I take a look over to my left-hand side in my Projects panel, I can see a new document being shown here, a PCB_Project1, and that's a PCB Project file or .PrjPCB. Now from this I'd probably like to add a few more documents, so generally you want a few Schematic sheets and maybe a few PCB layout sheets as well in there. So I can just right-click directly on the PCB Project, see, Add New to Project, and maybe I want a Schematic in there. Now I can see my first Schematic document being shown within this project, and I can add as many documents as I may need, so just repeat that process. Right-click on my project, Add New to Project, let's say one more Schematic, and repeat the process once more, and maybe choose a PCB layout as well. So now I have a fairly simple project here, currently just called PCB Project1. Within this project, I have two Schematic sheets and one PCB layout. Now most likely you'd like to save all these files out and maybe give them more appropriate names, so to do this I can just again right-click on the project, choose Save Project As, and this will actually ask me to save out anything that has not yet been saved, so the top level PCB Project file as well as each of the Schematic sheets, each of the PCB layouts, really all the files within that project. You can save this wherever you'd like. I am just going to throw it into the default location here and maybe I'll create a new folder, just to hold all of these project files, maybe I'll call it Lilypad, and I'll jump into that folder and save out all my files here. So the first file I'm saving out here is the PCB1, PCB layout file, maybe I want to give this a better name, so let's call it maybe Lilypad PCB1, and I can hit Save for that. And it's going to go through and ask me to save any file that I haven't yet saved, so I haven't saved anything yet. So now it's going to my Schematic Sheet1 maybe I'll give this a name of Lilypad Schematic1, and now Sheet2, I want to change that name as well, let's call this Lilypad Schematic 2 or whatever your sheet name and system may be. And then finally, it's asking me to save the top level PCB Project name, maybe I'll call this zero two, zero one LilyPad and hit save. So now I have created my very first project, of course it's pretty much empty as of now, but I've generated and saved out a bunch of project files including the top level Project PCB as well as a few Schematic documents and a PCB layout document.

Contents