The PCB Design Professionals

Creating Custom Board Shapes – 13.

There are two main ways we use to create board shapes they are by Creating a Shape or importing it from a DXF or DWG.

Creating a Shape.

Creating a board shape is quite similar to creating a cut out – Convert.

The first thing that you will need to do is draw a shape in primitives (tracks, arcs, etc) that represent your board outline.

Once you have the shape you need to select the primitives then go to “Design” -> “Board Shape” -> “Define From Selected Objects” once you’ve clicked this your board shape should change to the shape you have drawn.

Importing a DXF/DWG.

You can also define a board shape from an imported DXF.  To import a DXF go to “File” -> “Import” DXF/DWG are the defaults but there other import options there.  Navigate to your DXF or DWG file and open it.  You should be presented with a dialogue box like this.

You’ll need to change a few settings as listed below.

Blocks – We usually check the “Import as Primitives” in the “Blocks” section.  Importing as primitives is more flexible for editing at a later stage.

Scale – Set the scale to match that of your DXF/DWG.  You get a rough idea of the size along the bottom of the “Scale” section.

Drawing Space – We usually select “Model” so that we don’t import any drawing borders and just get the relevant information.

Default Line Width – Fairly self explanatory select the line width for you imported primitives.

Locate AutoCAD (0,0) at – Use this to set the origin of your imported primitives.  Either type the X and Y locations or click select and click again in the Altium Design Space to set the origin.

Layer Mappings – Use this section to set which layers of your CAD drawing import into Altium and on which layers.

Once you have all of these set up the way you want them, click ok and vew the lovely imported CAD drawing.  Should you get an error message, or nothing imports, the most common cause we have found is that the scale has been set incorrectly and the import is too large for Altiums design space.

OK, so now you have your DXF imported it’s just a case of selecting the relevant sections of the Imported primitives and creating your board shape from selected primitives as above. Job Done.

Kelson Batista kindly emailed us to ask how to create a circular board shape and this was the inspiration for this blog post. Your input is valued, so if you have any comments or suggestion email them to – blog@blackstick.co.uk or post up a comment below.