altium board defining

[hsn93]

hello, i've been trying to define my board shape.

i've seen on the internet that i can click (space) and corners will be converted to radius as its what i require .. but (. , or shift > and <) to increase radius was not working for me .. i couldnt find soloution ..

so i did things manual which is placing tracks and arcs in keep-out-layout ..

but i dont know what happened exactly now there is white sheet in altium (maybe i pressed some hotkey):


how to make it back to black ? the background of the pcb is white

[hsn93]

the white problem was fixed by (options > board options > [] display sheet)

however, anyone have better way of creating board shape?

[ajb]

They way you've done it is fine, lines and arcs are typical.  If you have a 3D model of a housing or something it's possible to define a board outline from a 3D Body, but I generally don't find this very useful.  You can also import a DXF or DWG into the outline layer if you've got the shape already figured out (or are using an outline provided by an enclosure manufacturer). 

You probably want to define those holes as actual holes (use the pad tool and set the pad size to zero) so that they wind up in the drill file rather than as shapes in your outline layer.  You can define mounting holes as PCB/Sch symbols so that you have standard sizes in your library and can show electrical connections to them in the schematic if necessary.

[Gibson486]

Altium's board shape editor is kind of bad. However, I never tried board shape editors in other pcb packages, so it may be true for all. I usually just bug the MEs to make an outline (or give me a 3d model) and import or I use some tool (like draftsight) to generate the dxf myself.