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Component Creation Flow
{Create flow chart explaining the major steps and determining some of the edge cases like “can I clone this from something else” or “can I import this from easy EDA”}
Creation via Clone
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Most importantly, all three of these methods need to create components that follow the Vault Guidelines! |
Creation via Clone
Cloning is used for components that have the same package and type (or otherwise just a notable enough amount of similarities) to existing components in the vault. For example resistors, where we may have hundreds 0603 resistors, but each has a different value, tolerance, and power rating (and more)!
This is arguably the easiest and fastest processes as it ideally only takes changing a few numeric values (no footprint work).
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{details on process} |
Creation via Import/Download
{Summary of when we can do this}Downloading and importing a component is the best way to bring in a new footprint, when the option is available. Not all components will have a footprint online to download, but when it exists it does save a lot of manual design. This process is for all components with footprints that we haven’t vaulted yet, but can be found online.
Common sources of footprints online are:
SnapEDA
UltraLibrarian (Digikey)
SamacSys (Mouser)
Celestial Library
This method allows for some time savings by avoiding the detailed drawing and dimension work, but still requires definition of the parameters and realignment of the footprint to NER standards.
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Creation from Datasheet/Scratch/Custom
{Summary of when}Creation from scratch is the most annoying, but comprehensive method for creating a component footprint. This is typically used for components that don’t have data available online or components that NER has created custom.
As said above, this is the most tedious but thorough method of component creation.
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Pin Swapping
Pin swapping is a feature that Altium recently added allowing for symbols and footprints to be manually remapped on a per-component basis. This allows for more components to use fewer symbols and footprints!
The process is pretty simple, just click the pin swap button in the component edit view. Then use the table to remap.
{2 images, first showing the button, second showing the table}
Official Altium documentation: {need to find}
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