Electronics > Altium Designer

"IT'S TOO BIG!" says everyone, including my PCB assembler...

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mikeselectricstuff:
Not familiar with Altium but I use PCAD2006 which I believe has some similarities. Could you not drag-select all components on each side in turn and set their value property to "NF"

Just_another_Dave:
Although I’ve never used it, Altium provides tools for designing multiboard projects (including mechanical collision detection). Maybe it isn’t too difficult to divide your design into 2 PCBs while keeping a single schematic

tszaboo:

--- Quote from: frogblender on October 12, 2021, 04:20:37 am ---
--- Quote from: ANTALIFE on October 11, 2021, 10:46:11 pm ---As others have said, ideally this would be two (or more) projects...

If you are bent on keeping it as a single project (with a single PCB file) then you will need to make sure there are no repeated designators and that the broken connection errors the DRC throws up make sense. Then generate the Gerber, NC Drills, P&P as usual and make it really clear which board is which. Give all files to your PCB fab/assembly house and tell them something like, I want 2 copies of board Y and 4 copies of board X. They will be able to separate the two designs when they generate the machine file, though they would probably charge you a bit more as there is more work involved in doing so. If this sounds like a lot of steps to worry about then time to split up the single project...

--- End quote ---

--- Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on October 08, 2021, 09:59:09 pm ---If it will be made as two boards I don't think it makes sense to keep it as one design file, as any changes mean you'll need to go through the process of splitting again.

--- End quote ---

The though of splitting it in two separate project gives me chills:  the design is heavily heirarchical, and splitting all that up, figuring out what bits go on which half, and hoping you don't miss anything... and then deleting the other half.. and hoping you don't delete too much... and all the dangling nets that are likely to result... all that all seems like a nightmare. 

Currently, as a single design, the gerbers are perfect:  there is one gerber output, with a cut line down the middle;  I could just give it to the boardshop as-is, and get two raw cards in return.
As for assembling the board:  I cooked up a .net, which takes the single pick-n-place file, parses each line, and if the x-coordinate of a component is on the left of the cut line, it writes the component to  PNP_LEFT.txt,  otherwise it writes to PNP_RIGHT.txt.   Works a treat. 

The next logical (and so far incomplete) step is to use the LEFT and RIGHT pnp files to similarly split up the bom.csv into bom_LEFT.csv and bom_RIGHT.csv.

It is a post-altium step to run the .net utility, but it is a single command that executes in a second.

If anyone can see any flaws in my methodology, please let me know.

--- End quote ---
One project, one PCB, that's how it works.
You can put them into a project group, which might give you an advantage. IDK what, it is a relatively new feature.

epongenoir:
Have you tried with circuit variants? Once I stumbled into a Webinar about them, and it might be fitting at least for the BOM

free_electron:
i call BS. You cannot simply cut a layout in half and then 'wire it using connector'. where are those 'connectors' in your design ? How do you assign signals ? if you cut the board : the trace stubs are still covered in soldermask . How will you solder that ?
There is much more going on here than simply 'cutting a board in half'

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