Altium Circuit Maker Tips

Altimum Circuit Maker is a straight-forward tool to use and has lots of online tutorials. This page tells you what layers to export for PCB fabrication.

Before generating your PCB files, your board must have a well-defined outline drawn on some unused layer. Use the View>Single Layer mode and find a layer that does not have anything on it (layers to try are Outline, Dimensions Top, Dimensions Bottom). Draw a rectangle (four separate lines) that encompasses your board. The dimensions of this outline will be your board size. The coordinates of the lower left should be 0,0; the coordinates of upper right is width, height.

To generate PCB files, use menu option Project > Generate outputs. Select the Gerber Files and NC Drill Files options. Before clicking the Generate option, you must configure the Gerber Files to be generated. The defaults are fine for NC Drill Files, there is no need to configure this.

Click on the Configure option for Gerber Files, then select the Layers tab in the popup window. The layers are shown below. At at minimum, you will need Top Overlay, Top Paste, Top Solder, Top Layer, Bottom Layer, Bottom Solder, Bottom Past. You only need Bottom Overlay if you have silkscreen text on the back of the board (only needed if you have placed components on back of the board). In the picture below, I used the 'Outline' layer for my board outline (but you need to check whatever layer you used for the board outline). All of the other layers are not needed. You should not have any mechanical layers checked.

After clicking on the Generate button, a compressed zip archive will be created that has two directories named Gerber and NC Drill. Make a new directory called pcbfiles, and copy Gerber/{.GBL, .GBP, .GBS, .GTL, .GTO, .GTP, .GTS} files. If you have bottom overlay, then you also need to copy the Gerber/.GBO file. Also copy the NC Drill/.TXT file (this is the drill file for the holes in your PCB). Also copy whatever layer you used for the outline line layer and give it a file extension of .OLN . The pcbfiles directory will now contain all of the files needed by a PCB house. You may also want to create a README.TXT in this directory with contents of:

• .TXT - drill file
• .GBL - bottom copper
• .GBP - bottom paste
• .GBS - bottom solder
• .GBO - bottom overlay (silk screen) -- only needed if you have silk screen on the bottom of your board. Do not include if this layer is empty.
• .GTL - top copper
• .GTP - top paste
• .GTS - top solder
• .GTO - top overlay (silk screen)
• .OLN (board outline, rename whatever layer used for the board outline to be something.OLN).

This README.TXT tells the PCB fab house how to correlate files to layers.

In your email with these files, you also need to tell me the board dimensions in INCHES (x by y). PCB fab houses require this when the order is made.