Question about Ground Planes in Circuit Stuido

Hi,

That is a pretty general and basic question. Have you searched for an gone through some of the tutorials?  Circuitstudio has some and also some for Altium Designer might help you.

Maybe start at this link below or find some others....

From Idea to Manufacture - Driving a PCB Design through CircuitStudio | Online Documentation for Altium Products

Other sites and even other PCB design software may describe the basics

When you are in the PCB design (as opposed to schematic design) you would use a via to connect an outer layer pad to a ground plane on an inner layer.  If you instead mean a ground flood on an outer layer then you would place a net to connect these.

Hi Thomas. Thank you for your help. As I stated in my question, I am new to Circuit Studio, so I really appreciate you taking the time out to help me. I will research the site you gave me. How would I construct a net in the PCB design mode? What I need to do is to pour a GND plane on my bottom layer and open up all the pads that need to see ground to it so that they connect. I'm just not sure how to establish a net for a GND plane.

Hi Jack.

In addition to Thomas's suggestion I would also recommend watching the tutorial videos that are on this site if you are new to CircuitStudio and want to get up to speed quickly.

Getting Started with CircuitStudio: Video Tutorial Series

CircuitStudio works best when you start with a schematic design for your circuit that allows entry of all the parts and net connectivity. This is then used to generate the PCB which you can they layout and route. If you are trying to work on just a PCB then you will find it very difficult because you will need to go around manually assigning nets to pins which is harder than doing the same on a schematic.

See my reply on the other question you asked about PCB scoring.  I think the element14 videos for CircuitStudio will go along way to answer some of your questions and help minimize frustration.

The basic answer to your question might be, once you define a copper pour area/shape on your layer you would configure it and assign a net name.  You might first draw the lines, arcs and such as primitives and then select them and use the Polygon Pour menu to define a Polygon Pour from the selected objects.

Then select the pour shape and configure it as you want.  This will take some experimentation for you at first.

To tie the component pads to the copper pour (or ground flood) you would need to specify how to connect as part of the rules.  In that case, it would be the Polygon Connect Style type of rule.  You might want a relief connect or direct connect or you can instead place nets to manually make the connection.

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your input. I have watched the tutorial videos. There is a tutorial that has 11 videos in all and I watched them. They have helped me a lot and I am getting more familiar with Circuit Studio, but I didn't see where they mentioned connecting a pad directly to a ground plane or how to add a score line to a PCB board, so that you can separate it into two sections. But I will continue to watch the tutorials and search the forum for answers. Thank you again for helping me to get started.

Hello Thomas and Peter. 

I am having another issue with Circuit Studio that I hope you can help me with. The issue is with the Altium Content Vault. When I search for a part, in the vault explorer,  I use to get a folder that was titled “All Folders” and the part I was searching for was inside that folder. I would click on the folder, it would open and the part list would appear. For some reason, this folder no longer appears when I do a part search in the vault explorer. Now what I get is a folder that reads, “ Object reference not set to an instance of an object”. I click on the fold, but nothing happens. It doesn’t open. Please see the attached screen shot. Do you know what might be causing this issue and how I can get back to the folder that use to say “All Folders”, so that I can view the parts that I am searching for?

Please see the several other related threads that have happened in the past week.  This seems to be a new issue that people are seeing.  We are waiting to hear from Altium on this.

Ok, thank you. It's very frustrating. It was working fine a few days ago then it started giving me issues the other day. Is there any thread that tells you how to correct the issue?

We are waiting for Altium to investigate as the vault issue does seem to be affecting a number of people.