October 14, 2019
The #AltiumLive2019 PCB Design Conference was a Wonderful Event: Recap and Links
Altium Live 2019 took place this past week at Loews Coronado Bay resort near San Diego, California and Advanced Assembly was pleased to be a sponsor.
While wary engineers might worry that a conference sponsored by a specific EDA tool is not for them, nothing could be further from the truth. AltiumLive does have software-specific sessions — but there are also concurrently running sessions that discuss topics such as Power Delivery, PCB Layout, Hardware Security, etc… So it is possible to spend both days of the conference attending classes that have everything to do with Altium or nothing to do with Altium. Most sessions simply discuss topics that are of use to electrical engineers and use Altium as the tool for explanation.
For those engineers that were unable to attend this year, Altium has already posted their keynote presentations. So don’t miss out on an opportunity to collect free knowledge based on the professional experiences of Eric Bogatin, Rick Hartley, Joe Grand, Robert Feranec and others!
Team-Building
In addition to sessions and keynotes, Altium has hosted a robot-building competition on the first night of the conference each year. Each dinner table is provided a box of robot parts, multiple FlySky remote controllers, Sabertooth motor controllers, Actobotics parts, etc… and is given approximately two hours to create a robot that will battle other robots to the death! But since all engineers come to the tables with different skill-sets, Altium handicaps the teams by offering a very generous “open-bar” to all participants. If you see a neighboring team outperforming your own, why not treat them to a free round of beer?
At the robot building event, Altium announced that it would sponsor California State University, Fullerton’s Mars Rover project. Each year, teams from across the world come to the Utah desert with a custom-built rover that has to accomplish several tasks such as collecting and analyzing soil samples, navigating autonomously using SLAM, and sensor data fused between cameras and LiDAR.
Altium Designer 20
Altium also announced its upcoming “Altium Designer 20.” Altium Designer is already a fully featured software suite — this year’s release focuses improvements in tools and collaboration. To show off the calibration capability, Altium demonstrated a team from across the globe working together, in real-time, on a PCB project using Altium 365. You can see it on the Altium page linked above once it is posted.
Interactive Autorouter: Engineers have increased capabilities to push, shove, and gloss traces, as well as provide channels, rooms, and other tools to restrict the path and reach of auto-generated routes.
Multi-board Design: Whether your project uses one board or twenty, Altium can handle it in one schematic file and one project.
Simulation: Altium replaced the Spice simulation engine to improve functionality for engineers. Additionally, Altium has an agreement with Simberian to use its SIMBEOR Electromagnetic Signal Integrity Software in future releases.
I Almost Forgot!
Altium sponsored InspectAR as their startup company of the year! You may have noticed a previous blog post where we showed you DebuggAR. The engineers at InspectAR and DebuggAR decided to combine their talents and efforts to create the multi-platform InspectAR software that helps engineers debug their boards. InspectAR uses your board data files and either a computer or smartphone to provide an augmented reality experience. This lets engineers select pads, parts, or nets for probing and board inspection. See the demonstration video below for a demo.
#AltiumLive2019 was a wonderful event!