The one I’ve created will be far too small for the end component!Īfter the rectangle, we’ll create our first pin, which is going to be the seed for all the others. The size of the rectangle doesn’t matter. By placing the rectangle for the component body first, it will save us having to move it behind the pins later, it just saves a little time. Then, in the new component, we place a rectangle.

The first thing we’ll do in Altium is to create a new schematic library by going to File -> New -> Library -> Schematic Library. However, I’ve created nearly 500 symbols like this, so I have a bit of experience that helps me get work done fast! If the data in the datasheet didn’t need so much cleanup, it would have been around 4-5 minutes. It took me just over 7 minutes to create this 144 pin part which is a little slow for me. Looking at the datasheet for this part, the pin out table (5.1, ) is not ideal for this process, but that’s OK-datasheets are rarely ideal for creating symbols.īefore going into detail on how to create this component, I ran through it myself to make sure I wouldn’t miss any steps as I wrote the article. Copy and pasting the pin descriptions for every pin on this package would be time consuming, boring, and error-prone, so let’s not do that! It looks like a nice microcontroller in a LQFP-144 package. I then sorted by the quantity available, and the winner is an NXP MK64FN1M0VLQ12. To find a part to use for this article, I headed over to Digi-Key and looked in the Embedded - Microcontrollers category for an in-stock ARM Cortex M series microcontroller with onboard FLASH and more than 100 pins of GPIO. I’ll be using Google Sheets, but Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice work just fine. NET flavor as it has a few neat features. Some knowledge of Regular Expressions.This article will be looking at a PDF datasheet. A good datasheet, or a plain text pin definitions file.Pre-requisitesīefore we get started, you’ll need a couple of things: In this article, I want to show you how you can leverage some of the tools in Altium to create your own symbols quickly. People are often surprised when I tell them it only takes a few minutes to make a schematic symbol using Altium, even if the part has a high pin count. My open-source Altium component library contains hundreds of schematic symbols, supplying over 100,000 components for use.

Altium copy footprint to library