PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Just a general poll/survey - have any teams embarked successfully on an FRC-sized PCB design project? If so, what did you work on? I'd like to expand the horizons of our electrical team beyond "wiring the robot" (with all due respect to the intricacies and challenges of really good layout/wiring). The Altium Designer donation seems too generous an offer to pass up.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

I've contemplated it, but my biggest worry is using Altium to design a board, then have them not sponsor us in the future completely taking away our ability to change/modify or even open the Altium files. Well, that's my reasoning for not even learning Altium. I've started working with KiCAD because I know I'll never have to worry about licensing. Yes, KiCAD does not have all the bells and whistles that Altium Designer has, for FRC, we likely won't be needing all the bells and whistles. Something Altium Designer is good at is autorouting the fanning of large BGA packages (by the way, most people use auto-routing wrong). However, for FRC, I really don't see much need to use too many large BGA packages.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Oliver worked on a PCB (CAN terminator for FIRST CAN) with me using Altrium via the FIRST license and produced a 3D rendering of it. I took the Gerber outputs and NC drill files and produced circuit boards on my LPKF Protomat 92S circuit board systems then hand soldered some surface mount parts to them.

So the programs work great and produce the professional outputs required as industry standard to make printed circuits boards at professional shop.

The files can be exported to other CAD and EDA systems. I am pretty sure I exported to DXF. Of course if you just want to make more boards you can just use the Gerber and NC files you already have. Plus the net lists should still be valid.

I've made 6 layers boards with thousands of parts. Autorouters are great tools but they don't handle RF problems and they surely are not necessary with simple designs. You can lay out a simple board with a Sharpie marker on the copper clad itself and get everything you need for a simple PCB from RadioShack in a kit.

Learning how to use an EDA package is a valuable skill but it's not the only choice to do the job you could draw the image in Microsoft Paint (bitmap) or InkScape (vector and also free) and get the basic image you need (but the NC drill files would be your problem to make).

I have noticed that quite a few people don't seem to realize that Altrium is offering to let FIRST teams use their very expensive tools for basically free. It's a great opportunity to learn how to do this with a professional tool for the this function.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Thanks for all of the information so far. I'm pretty familiar with Altium and use it quite often at work. Auto-route was summarily banned in our group, as we felt attempting to use it made meeting IPC-6011 Class 3 standards quite difficult.

My question was more about what kind of projects people have done (i.e the CAN terminator techhelpbb talked about). Maybe some utility/side projects - battery charging, cart equipment? Robot parts tend to be very application specific (if you're going to do a custom circuit, it better be) but I'd love to hear some of those ideas too.

The projects don't necessarily have to make 100% economical sense - this is a learning environment and buying something off the shelf because it's cheaper doesn't really teach you much.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

On FRC 2729 we have built a few custom boards using ExpressPCB.com. While not a portable format, their board prices are very fair and layout software is free. We have done everything dual sided, through hole for ease in hand assembly.

We have built custom sensor boards (hall effect, IR break/reflective beam) as well as a more advanced PIC uController PWM generator board we used constantly for prototyping and testing. For the sensor boards they are typically smaller than a stick of gum and provide the 3 pin PWM header and required components. We have sold the assembled Hall Effect sensor board to a fair amount of teams. We did a motor current sensor board as well.

We also built a simple board for connecting the 4 wire quadrature encoder wires to the standard PWM headers.

Hope this gives you some ideas and if you would like more details on the designs PM me.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Those are fantastic projects, iambujo! Thanks for the ideas. Hopefully some other teams will post what they've come up with as well.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Just thought I'd share that I had worked on a boarduino last year, and haven't used Altium, but I have used EagleCAD which is free for 2 layer boards and works well in my experience.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

I'm going to second EagleCAD. The free version should be good for most projects, and there are a TON of resources out there for it.

I use Altium at work a lot, but find myself going back to Eagle for personal projects just because it's so much easier for small boards.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

We (FRC 2252) used Altium Designer to design a four channel optical sensor interface board late in the season last year. We wanted to use retroreflective sensors as part of a closed-loop control on our three shooter wheels to try and improve our shot consistency. There were several inexpensive candidate emitter/detector pair sensors available but it wasn't clear exactly which one would work best under the field lighting conditions (even though they were all IR, I have seen cases where sensors with a broad enough sensitivity spectrum can get screwed up by sunlight). Since each model sensor had a different threshold voltage, the purpose of the comparators was to convert a variable threshold (set via a multi-turn pot) to a 5VTTL digital signal; that signal would then be routed to the cRIO and processed using the WPILib encoder function. The PCB also had a connector scheme such that PWM cables could be used to interface directly with the DSC (and get power from it) and also support a "standard" (of our own devising) sensor interface connector. Each channel also had a superbright SMT LED on the PCB to assist in setting an independent threshold value for each channel.

We didn't actually use the donated Altium license; I have access to a couple of permanent licenses that we used instead.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Last year the team I mentor (3786) had a feeding mechanism to push the disks into the shooting wheel. We had a chain with two pushing posts that would go around and catch on the inside lip of the disk and push it forward. We used a photo-interrupter to detect when we were in the correct position to stop. The problem we had was the pulse from the photo-interrupter was too short for the crio to detect (sometime it would go through 4 or 5 cycles before stopping). Anyway, I showed the students how a 555 timer could be used to generate a fixed output pulse when the pulse from the photo-interrupter was fed into it. This fixed our problem and we were able to always detect the position of our feeder.

We used a very simple (crude) prototyping board to implement the 555 timer circuit, but it very easily could have been done with a PCB.

If I was to create a PCB for such a simple circuit, I'd go with PCB Artist (from Advanced Circuits)

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Eric, I along with 4 other group members designed some low noise amplifier designs with Altium Designer. We got the gerbers and the drill files and got those designs manufactured successfully. Although it wasn’t much of a hassle but I personally didn’t like Altium a lot because it isn’t as much accommodating for a user as it should have been. At the end of the day, I’d prefer Advanced Design Suite over Altium.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Our team (997) created an electrical tester that is based on the Arduino base (actually just the AVR chip itself), and LCD screen and a number of passive components. I created the design using Eagle and found it quite easy to use. The design was a simple two-sided through hole layout and it went very smoothly.

I had the boards fabricated by oshpark and found them very reasonable for prototype cost and delivery time. Quality of the boards was also very good. They accept standard Gerber files (from Altium and other standard CAD packages) or directly from Eagle design files. I found their price for production quantities a little high and am sure you can do better from other higher volume PCB vendors.

Some of the folks from OSHPARK are mentors on FIRST teams in the Portland/Vancouver area and they understand FIRST.

While this might sound like an advertisement for them, I am just a satisfied customer.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Wow, I didn't know that. I've gotten boards made at Oshpark a couple of times, and they're really great.

Re: PCB Projects with Altium Designer
 

Thanks for all of the awesome project ideas, folks!

It would be pretty awesome, if the project authors were willing, to somehow collect and collaborate on these FIRST / FRC related electronics projects. Any thoughts?