Cabling in Altium Designer

The term “off-label” is used to describe the use of a product for which it was not intended. For example, it may surprise you that many system engineers use Altium Designer’s schematic as a drawing tool. They may also use it for the ease of creating a bill of materials by simply declaring an item (such as equipment, test fixtures, racks, tools, etc.) as a library component.
The same can be said about Altium Designer’s assistance with cable creation. The trick is to know what features of the cable are electrical, physical, or both. It requires some creativity and to recognize the inherent limitations when using Altium Designer “off label” for cabling.
This webinar will summarize the cable creation capability within Altium Designer:
• Expectations
• Physical versus electrical elements of a component
• Use of DXG/DWG to create 2D graphics in minutes
• Library configuration consideration
• Example of a completed design
Would you like to see other webinar recordings or videos from us? Check out ninedotconnects... or reach out to us at [e-mail] or 214-699-7719. Thanks!

[@nithinmaipandavis6874]

Great way to put everything together, its helps a lot to understand the constraints and benefits of Altium and work with it.

[@NineDotConnects]

Thanks for your comment.

[@Svistofication]

Thanks for this video. Very nice approach. It can be very practical. Will see how it goes during use

[@kianemami9090]

thank you a lot , this helped me so much !

[@NineDotConnects]

Glad it helped!

[@colabstr]

Thanks for great video, I try to import DXF format but altium program did'nt work correctly. Can you show step->dxf file, or can you share some libraries to test my program ? File downloaded from traceparts is very big and I can not open altium library.

[@NineDotConnects]

In reviewing the video (31:33), the DXF/DWG import dialog does not provide the ability to select which DXF/DWG file format to use. Oddly, this is available in the DXF/DWG import tool in the PCB editor, so it is not understood why Altium did not include this in the schematic DXF/DWG import tool.
Unfortunately, Importing DXF/DWG files requires some trial and error since the formats were never formally defined.
For reference, we have had good success with DXF/DWG imported from SOLIDWORKS and 3D Content Central (which happens to be owned by Dassault Systems, the parent company of SOLIDWORKS.)
Recommendation 1: If you can access the program generating the DXF/DWG file, try setting the format version to “2000”.
Recommendation 2: Try to import the DXF/DWG file into the PCB editor. Once you have it imported as expected, save that result at a DXF/DWG export. Then open the schlib file and try importing the Altium exported DXF/DWG file.
We wish we could be more definitive with our response. If you do figure it out, please post!