How to Design Bending Regions in Flex PCBs

[@fedimakni1200]

Could you make a video about panelized PCB vs single board PCB in term of cost when sending them to manufacture? From small Qte to big Qte. Thanks.

[@berntd]

Regarding the definition of a flexi part as rigid for the purpose of 3D locking it (see ~9:45), how will this work for a flexi that is bent into a circle with no flat parts?

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

That's a great question! I have never done this before, but I think you need to define the entire section of the flex ribbon as a bending region, then you could try defining a rotation angle. The bending animation will only put curvature in the region where you defined the bending region, so a larger bending region will create larger curvature. Give it a try and let me know if it works.

[@berntd]

One issue I have is that when changing any board shape/outlines, all the Flexi setup gets deleted. The rigid, flex and bending regions, the lot all vanish. A lot of extra work to redo every time a small change is made. Is there a way around that?

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

I'm not sure why that is happening, I would have to try and reproduce it to see what to do. I will say that it is best practice to draw outlines of those regions in a mechanical layer. If you have that layer, you can make it visible when drawing out the regions and the drawing tool can snap onto those outlines in the mechanical layer. Then if the regions do happen to get deleted, you can quickly redraw them.

[@berntd]

@@Zachariah-Peterson yes, please try it. They do not need re-drawing but they have to be re- defined as in all the flex and rigid sections vanish (the whole thing becomes a single rigid pcb) and so do all the bending lines and bending widths. It is not quick to re-create this every time it happens and it is easy to make a mistake.

[@electrobotics43]

I want to learn altium, but you put so high prices. 😢

[@theondono]

AFAIK Altium still provides student licenses.

[@electrobotics43]

@theondono i dont have student id

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

You can download CircuitMaker for free. Most of the features in Altium can be found in CircuitMaker and they function the same way as in Altium Designer.

[@petersage5157]

Altium offers a free trial. I have no experience with Altium, but my experience with other free trials of commercial software tells me that it will be both time- and feature-limited. Whether the free trial will be useful to you or not? Your mileage will vary. I'm a FOSS guy, so I wouldn't touch Altium with a barge pole; I'm mostly just here for Zach's circuit design and layout videos.

[@stephenjbro]

I'd recommend either forking over $2k/year for the standard individual license, or using KiCAD (free and open source). If you have no (or limited) PCB design experience and do not design PCBs professionally, I would go with the free option. Altium pricing is comparable to similarly capable software, and though "high" for an individual hobbyist, the prices certainly aren't exorbitant for a company or professional freelancer.