Beautiful PCB Designs in Altium

[futura2012]

I was going to ask if this is possible but after some routing around on Google I found this:





It would appear these are boards where the designer has utilised the PCB manufacture process to produce effectively some glorified coasters   this is not exactly my intention but the theory is the same.

I wanted to know if it is possible to import JPGs (vectors) into altium to be used for effectively tracks. Well not tracks but what would normally form the track ie the metal bit to make crazy designs such as this on your board.

Why do i want to do this? I was given the inspiration by one of daves videos on youtube discussing using the back of a PCB as the panel.  its his micro-amp product.  I then thought could you take this one step further and use the tracks to form instrument gauges etc?

if you can this would be cool. I would really value any comments about the feasibility of this idea?

When I say instrument gauge just to be clear i mean something like this using PCB tracks. 



can altium potentially do this with imported files?

Inkscape with the inkscape scale generator is a beautiful way to make these gauge designs in vectors.

[Wilksey]

Most PCB packages can in some form or another allow you to create "beautiful" PCB's, you can in most packages import vector art / Bitmaps and use it as a layer (Copper, Silk, etc).

[free_electron]

you can import DXF but, why bother. Altium is a very powerful vector drawing tool in itself.

simply define polar grids around the axes of the potentiometers and bob's your uncle ! you can even rotate text on the polar grid so you can have text placed on the circumference fo a circle.

set your roation step in opions-preferences. if you set the step there to 10 degrees you can do really crazy stuff.

i've done a really crazy shaped board that holds led's that have to go around a connector. that connector is not round but a very special shape. pulled in as STEP file. defined contour from a plane . exported that to a mechanical layer , defined polar grids on the centerpoints of the arcs and of i went. the leds sit a very strange angles but they all line up perfectly to the board shape and their centers are all where they need to be. took me half an hour to set up the polar grids. after that placement was piece of cake.

you can put the objects in a union and then scale the union in altium. traces, text, everything scales.

[T3sl4co1l]

JPG != vector?

JPG is just about the worst image type to try to import, anyway; even if you can't spot it with the untrained eye, the images are inherently blurry and 24 bit color (or at least 8 bit color for the rarely-seen grayscale JPG).

Obviously, PCB layers are on-or-off, so a two color format is fine.  I've seen 2-color BMP and PNG available as import in a number of packages.  (Both formats contain dimensional information, but it's rarely used.)

DXF and GRB import natively because they are dimensioned engineering drawings, but I'm not sure if other vector formats do.  Presumably you could go all Don Lancaster on it and import PostScript and the like -- but I don't suppose most packages import that.  (Kind of a shame actually, as PS/EPS, PDF and so on also support or require dimensions.)

Tim

[dboyer]

I've been experimenting with pushing all of our symbols and logos into a truetype font.  It's vector-based, scales effortlessly, and our board houses seem happy with that approach from a DFM standpoint.  The same rules as far as min thickness and spacing apply, but it's been higher quality results than doing a raster-image import. 

To do those particular gauges though, it would be silly to do anything more complicated than just draw them on your design with track and text primitives.  A polar grid would make drawing the gauge lines real quick, and I'm sure there are other tricks that would be faster.