Electronics: schematic to board

Electronics lives in the green segment of the mode dial: Schematic draws the circuit, PCB lays out and routes the board. Both are included on Pro. Steps under the mode dial carry you from Circuit to Check circuit, Board layout, Routing, Check board and Make it; each step opens its own tools in the dock, ticks itself off as the design progresses, and marks the next step so you always know what comes next.

The side panel has Parts, Sheets and Checks tabs on the schematic and Layers, Nets and Checks on the board; whatever you select, its settings stay at the foot of the panel. Right-click either canvas for the commands that fit the selection, press ⌘K to find any command by name with Find anything, and press ? for the shortcut sheet.

Press P to open the parts library: about 22,000 parts grouped by kind, each with a picture, its pins, a suggested footprint, a 3D model and a datasheet where one exists. Common, recent and starred sections keep your usual parts close. Place a part, draw wires, and name nets with labels; ground and supply symbols, no-connect markers, buses and bus aliases keep larger sheets readable.

Big designs spread across several sheets, and a sheet can contain another sheet. Annotate renumbers designators, the Fields table edits every part's values in one grid, and Find and replace does what it says. Your own parts — made from a list of pins, or read from a datasheet PDF — live in My parts and team libraries alongside the built-in ones.

Update board carries the parts and connections across to PCB with a ratsnest. Set the outline by size, fit it to the parts, drag its corners, draw it, or take it from the 3D model of the enclosure. Arrange the parts, then route: by hand with layer switching, vias, curved tracks and a shove router that moves other tracks out of the way, or with the autorouter, which runs a clearance check and a straightening pass afterwards.

Copper zones and ground pours, keepouts, teardrops, stitching vias and via fences are all in the dock. Net classes carry clearance and length rules; differential pairs route together, length-match with meanders and change layer as a pair. Boards go up to eight layers with blind, buried and micro vias, and the stackup editor includes impedance, solder mask and paste settings. Check board runs the design rules; the 3D view shows the board with every part's model.

The Make it step exports what a board house and an assembler need: Gerbers, drill files, part positions and the parts list in one zip, plus schematic and board PDFs, DXF, STEP, GLB, IPC-2581, ODB++ and IPC-D-356. A fabrication-file viewer and drill maps let you check the files before you send them.

The BOM editor lays the parts list out in standard, JLCPCB or PCBWay formats as CSV or Excel, pulls prices and stock from Mouser and DigiKey, and the sourcing assistant combines near-identical passives, flags lifecycle status and proposes in-stock alternates. Panels add mouse-bite or V-score tabs, rails, tooling holes and fiducials; design variants keep per-variant fitted parts and values.

Before you order, run the design review. HelioAI checks the schematic for missing decoupling, floating resets, pull-ups, LED resistors, capacitor voltage ratings and ESD on connectors, and the board for decoupling distance, connectors at the edge, ground pour and mounting holes — each finding with a Fix button, and a Mute for the ones you have judged.

Open a part's datasheet in the panel and ask a question; the answer cites the pages it came from. Reports write an FMEA with risk scores and a bring-up test plan as CSV or Excel. The requirements card — supply, current, temperature, budget, quantity, board maker — is read by the assistant with every request. When the hardware is done, export the pin map as a C header, Arduino sketch, ESP-IDF or Zephyr overlay.

Because the board lives in the same project as the mechanical design, the enclosure can follow it. In the Model workspace, Make a case builds an enclosure around the board with standoffs at the mounting holes and wall openings for every connector. Show the board in its case to see it with the library 3D models of every part, and run the fit check: it reports parts that hit the case, the room under the lid, and connectors that have no wall opening.

Change the board and Update case re-derives the enclosure while keeping the dimensions you set in its code. When the enclosure comes first, outline the board from the 3D model instead.