SamacSys is the leading developer of software tools for creating and managing electronic component ECAD data. To learn more, visit Altium is exhibiting at embedded world 2019 in Hall 4, Stand 629.
We look forward to a successful collaboration between our two companies, and to delivering an enhanced customer experience.”Ī global leader in component library solutions, SamacSys ( ) has over 200,000 users in more than 180 countries its customers range from individual makers to professional engineers to international brands.Īltium’s integration with SamacSys will further complement the technical support, service, tools and resources that Altium already provides for more than 100,000 customers worldwide. “By enhancing Altium’s suite of PCB tools with our CAD models, we are providing direct access to these vital assets, making the engineering design process far more efficient and effective, and saving critical time for users. “Being able to integrate our eCAD model platform within the Altium product range is an exciting development for us,” said Alex MacDougall, CEO at SamacSys.
Announced today at the embedded world trade fair in Nuremberg, Germany, the collaboration will support Altium customers by directly integrating the SamacSys platform of free design resources, including PCB footprints, schematic symbols and 3D models for more than 15 million components. Fortunately this board didn’t have extensive changes and was quite small.Wallingford, UK and Nuremberg, Germany, 26 February 2019 – SamacSys Ltd, the world’s leading provider of electronic component CAD models, has completed a new integration with Altium, a leading supplier of PCB design tools. Manually check each PCB error after importing.Don’t try to match nets since the net names have changed (I learned this the hard way). Annotate the schematics for the new parts.Manually change all the existing schematic designators to match the the PCB.Change all the new components to ? designators (ie R?, C? etc).I didn’t want to redo all the changes and I was tired to messing with annotating the schematic.
The only problem was how to fix my existing project. Now everything should work as advertised. Then you have to re-update the PCB since all the net names have changed (don’t get me started on this one). That changes all of the schematic reference designators to match the PCB without parenthesis.
After an afternoon of playing around I discovered how to make it work: After you update the schematic from the PCB, you have to specifically backwards annotate the schematic using the generated ECO file (Tools -> Annotate Schematic -> Back Annotate). It asks way too many questions and I simply don’t have the patience to read and consider every message it tells me.Īs an experiment I tried a new project and I could reproduce the behaviour. I pretty sure that Altium asked me a question about it during the update, but who knows. In the process of updating the PCB it has decided to merge the component with the same reference designators together. The schematic annotation had assigned some of the new parts the same designator as existing PCB components after the reannotation. Most of the new parts disappeared and the nets were all messed up. I annotated the schematic for the new components and updated the PCB as normal. Last week I needed to update the board with some extra circuitry and change some nets. Especially when the generated BOMs and PDFs had all the correct PCB designators without the parenthesis business. This was my first time at it so I figured this was normal. Instead they had the correct PCB designator in parenthesis next to the schematic designator. The only weird thing was that all of the schematic designators didn’t change. Just reannotate the designators in the PCB file and then import the changes back to the schematic. I looked at Altium’s functionality and decided to try it on my last board. The process of reannotating the reference designators on the circuit board and importing the changes back into the schematic is called backwards annotation. That way all of the designators in sequence are nearby (at least in theory). I’m tired of searching for reference designators on circuit boards, so I decided to start annotating schematics from the PCB locations.