From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS PCB
Routing
- [Instructor] Now that we have placed all of our components on the PCB here, one of the most important aspects of PCB design is gonna be routing of those components. So we have a number of tools and commands to help us with our routing, it's a pretty straightforward process, pretty intuitive and easy to learn process here. Essentially I can just go to my home tab and I'm gonna find my routing options here, I can route, I can un-route and so forth. So let's just quickly take a look at routing a few simple components here. Of course we're not gonna do the whole board, but just a few components here and go through the basics. So you see a few of my components here, again the rats nest will be very useful here, showing me which components maybe connected to each other so I can see that these two pads, my C3 and R3 components should be routed. So I'm just gonna click on route up here, and then as I hover over a new pad you'll see it kind of highlights or shows this circular object once I have grabbed onto a pad accordingly, and I just click once to start. And now you can see I'm routing from that point, and I can just route to wherever I'd like and then again click to finish it off. So in this case it's just a simple right across here, click once to finish it off, and then I can hit either escape or right mouse button click to finish off that one route. Notice once hitting escape or right click there finishing off I'm still within my route command, cause generally you're gonna be doing a whole bunch of routing all at once, not just one routing line at a time. So now I'm gonna continue on real quick here, R2 to C1 here it looks like, as well as C1 to C2 here, and maybe escape to finish off there. So we can see we've very quickly done a couple quick routes between pads there and then also looks like I have a component here between S2 and R3 here, quick route there. Route here, and let's try something like this here. And then again when I'm finished hit escape, if you want to exit the route command completely just hit escape once more and then you're out of the command completely and again just very simple to jump back in, go back into my route up here again. So fairly simple process there, let's take a look at a few other options, so go back into route here, we go with this C2 pad here, okay looks like its just going straight up, but before I go there, a very handy hot key is the tilde key, if I just hit that tilde key, we're gonna see here all of my hot keys or shortcuts will pop up, so of course after some time and some experience you'll probably memorize these most commonly used hotkeys, but until then that tilde key will just pop up all of your potential hotkeys for you so you don't necessarily have to memorize them. So for example if I wanted to toggle my elbow side, I know now it's the spacebar, or I can just click it here, and we'll see that's going to toggle what side my elbow's occurring on. So again that was spacebar, so see if I hit spacebar there, I can see exactly what that's doing. Again, tilde key once more, see a whole bunch of options here, so maybe I want to cycle my cornering style, so that would be shift + space, or I can just hit right here, and notice now I have changed my cornering style. That was shift + space, and we can see now all the different cornering styles I can jump through there. So a whole number of command hot keys here. In this case I just want to go straight up, let's say somewhere about here, and hit escape.
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