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  1. Right click the cloud in the Projects panel and select “Create Project…”

  2. In the pop up, select “NER Standard Project” under the PCB category

  3. Enter a title and description

  4. Open the Advanced drop down. Select the three dots at the right end of the “Folder” field

  5. In the pop up, select where the project should go in the vault (somewhere in Projects!), and hit OK

  6. Click “Create”!

    1. Local Storage and Parameters can be left alone

  7. Your project will now be in the Projects panel. Make sure to “Save to Server” to allow others to see it.

Make sure to save to server to allow others to see the project!

Schematic Page Setup

Schematic Templates

All schematics in Altium will use a base template. Our vault has been configured such that all projects will default to the NER template, but if needed, the template can be selected from properties.

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When a schematic sheet is open, the properties panel will default to “Document Options” if nothing is selected. Within properties, the “Page Options” section allows for selection of templates.

Currently, NER has a letter and tabloid size template. We recommend starting with tabloid, and shrinking to letter if space allows once the schematic is done.

Title Block Parameters

By default, the title block will be entirely default. Title block text is updated via parameters in two locations, the documents and the project. Project parameters apply to all sheets and include the Project Name, Revision, and WBS. Document parameters are local to each sheet, allowing each sheet to have unique Sheet Name, Drawer, and Approver.

Similar to the above screenshot, document parameters are found by opening “Document Options” and switching to the “Parameters” tab.

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There are a lot of “system required” parameters that we unfortunately can’t delete from the template. The parameters you should edit are called “DrawnBy”, “ApprovedBy”, and “Title”

Project parameters can be found by opening Project Options and navigating to the “Parameters” tab. This can be found at the bottom of the “Project” menu, or by right clicking in blank space of a schematic sheet.

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In both menus, simply update the “Value” of the appropriate parameters and the title block will update automatically!

Basic Components and Wires

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  1. Open the panel via the panels button (or the components shortcut in the schematics toolbar!)

    1. If you see this just hit the blue “Use Existing Components”

  2. Select component type via the dropdown menu at the top of the panel

  3. Filter results (opened via the button in the top left of the panel)

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  4. Just Click + Drag the component in or Right-click and select “Place”

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  5. Adjust component position as needed (click and drag)!

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This section will encompass any features that we use frequently, but are beyond the scope of a basic introductory tutorial.

ActiveBOMs

This is Altium’s integrated Bill of Materials system that automatically checks all suppliers via Octopart! See Active BOMs for the full tutorial.

Variants

Variants are a way to indicate different manners in which a PCB may be populated with components for different use cases. For our purposes, they are generally used to indicate what components are DNP/DNI (Do Not Populate/Place/Install), which is useful in making sure that we don’t accidentally populate the wrong things when assembling boards.

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