So, I placed my part on a PCB which is now being manufactured. It’s just a little expansion board / riser board, that is meant to plug into a bigger PCB.
So to make designing that bigger PCB simpler, I would like to turn that first PCB into a part. Essentially the little PCB is just a 6x2 male pin header and 2 M2 screw holes, but I need to place it on the bigger PCB 8 times, so having a part would be helpful to align the holes and the corresponding female header
What is the simplest way to accomplish this? If it takes more than 5 minutes it’s not really worth it. I was thinking to just turn the board into an SVG and place that as an image so I can accurately align the holes and headers. But if there is an easy way to make a part, it would look a bit better.
Assuming the PCB is a sketch and has no traces other than the pads and screw holes, you should be able to export the pcb as a svg. Then you can either load that in to a part (suppressing schematic and breadboard if you don’t need them) or import the svg to the silkscreen. The part would be best if you want to automatically place the pads where they should go, the silkscreen image will only give you a placement template on the silkscreen layer, you would have to drag the header over the image to get the part in to the pcb.
Thanks Peter. The PCB did have traces and components but they are irrelevant for the main board. So I deleted them, exported it as an SVG and turned it into a part.
I didn’t think of just importing the SVG to create a part – that is very useful! Having it on the silkscreen worked fine too, but placing the holes manually was a bit tedious.
