I am in no sense a hardware engineer. In fact I am one of those people who was forbidden to ever pick up a soldering iron again, long before soldering became something that needed a microscope. However as an embedded software engineer I have made a lot of use of circuit board schematics over the years. Having a schematic to hand means being able to confirm quickly and easily which GPIO is controlling the indicator LED, which UART is connected to the serial terminal, or which analogue input a particular sensor is connected to.
When we started using Altium 365, accessing schematics for a project suddenly became a lot easier. I didn’t have to ask one of the hardware engineers to send me a PDF any more, I could just log in, pull up the relevant project and have the latest schematic there in front of me. Even better, Altium will show me PCB and 3D views of the laid out board, and information about the tracks. No more guessing which way up that connector is, I can just look at the PCB view and see which pin is which.
Suppose for example I was having some trouble with a SPI interface and wanted to stick it on a logic analyser. It’s not too hard to look at a schematic and find the relevant connections, particularly if you’ve written the code so you know which pins of the processor the signals come out of. In Altium I can just click on the “net” as it calls them and it will highlight that particular track wherever it runs.
All I need to do then is follow the signal through to a point where I can probe it, the connector J4 in this case. Then I can flip to the PCB view, where the tracks for this signal are also highlighted. That makes it easy to find J4 on the physical board I’m probing up. Even better, if you zoom in far enough Altium will show you which signal is on which pin.
Little things like this save you so much guesswork and double-checking.
Altium 365 is a browser-based application, which does lead to my only two complaints about it. First, while it has an elephantine memory for the commands you’ve given it, it can be quite slow to respond. I often find myself clicking and dragging to move around the schematic, then doing it again when nothing happens, only to find myself shooting way past my target as the application catches up with my drags. This can be stunningly annoying on a bad network day.
The other complaint I have is that Altium absolutely slugs your browser history. Every little thing you do seems to generate a new history entry, tracking exactly what coordinates are visible in which view with what zoom level. Just opening up a project to take the screen shots I used here led to over a hundred entries. Mostly this is just noise, but every now and then it can be quite a nuisance.
These are small complaints, though. If your company’s hardware engineers use Altium and you’re the sort of firmware engineer who regularly deals directly with PCBs, I cannot recommend Altium highly enough to you.