Locating centrum of a dpak footprint....
Ive now just copied a DPAK footprint into my own library...but its centrum is not marked, so i cant drop it on the centrum in the footprint editor.
Do you know the best way to find the centrum for a DPAK?....in Eagle i just draw construction lines and where they cross is the centrum...is that the right way to do it in Altium?
In the footprint editor, Edit > Set Reference > Center will set the component reference to the geometric center of the pads. This isn't always what you want (for example if all of the pads are to one side of the component), so you can also do Edit > Set Reference > Location and then click where you want the reference to be. It's not necessary to move the primitives around in the footprint to center them, although you can do that. Drawing construction lines to establish geometry is perfectly valid in Altium, although
as its needed for the pick n place coordinates.
Altium will generate a pick-and-place file without a marked center, just based on the component reference, but a marked center is definitely good practice.
Noddy version of Altium
Are there any youtube vids or docs, which give "altium for contractors"...ie people who just need to get a small board done and dont have the time to get into the myriadical depths of Altium?
Altium could do with a cut down "noddy" version...so contractors can just do something quickly, in the initial period when they dont have time to delve into the depths of PCB layout jargiography.
Or is there a "noddy altium" video , which shows you just how to do the basics, manually, in Altium?
Ehhh, I don't think the Altium team need anything else to distract them from the core product
. In all seriousness, Altium is a much more sophisticated tool than Eagle. There's vastly more capability and baked-in automation of data handling, and while it's easy to say 'but I never use X or Y or Z', the application workflow still depends on those things being in place, and adding an option to remove them makes the software
more complex, not less. Even if it's simpler for the user, it's more complex to develop, meaning more opportunities for problems to crop up. (It's something of a law of software development that the simpler it is to use, in terms of effort:results, the more complex it is to write and maintain.) Aside from which, you'd have to decide which of those features a "contractor" potentially needs, which first requires deciding what kind of design work a "contractor" does. The answer to the latter is "could be anything" and therefore the answer to the former is "all of them".
If you continue with Altium and put some effort into understanding the workflow I think you'll find that it's largely worthwhile in terms of productivity and capability in the end.
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