Quickstart Guide: Single Layer PCB Design with Altium Designer 25

[@ddimov2557]

Strange this was not implemented earlier. Metal core PCBs have been widely available for decades.

[@cpakditno4n95]

Is it free CAD?

[@petersage5157]

No, it's Altium. They have a free-as-in-beer trial, but don't expect to be able to produce anything useful with it. Since you asked, we do finally have a 1.0 release of FreeCAD announced just a few days ago. If you use a rolling Linux release, it might already be available in your package manager, but most of us will have to rely on backports or install it separately. But that has little if anything to do with Altium.

[@Mtaalas]

hell no... costs thousands of euros per license and yearly maintenance is thousands...

[@petersage5157]

Or just keep it as a two-layer board and either throw a ground plane on the bottom or leave it bare, whichever satisfies your design requirements and floats your goat, and specify through hole pads as top copper only. At any rate, your fabricator (Don't forget to call them!) will most likely be starting with two-layer stock, so just make it a two layer board already. 1:00 Why is Altium throwing this obviously AI generated rubbish at us?

[@thegame4027]

This is aimed at single layer aluminium / copper backed PCBs and single layer PCBs produces in millions, or even tens of millions, where the fabricator won't "start with a two-layer stock anyway" for sure because that additional copper would cost tens of thousands of dollar. That's a really hobbyist take on a feature that can be usefull to many people in the industrie. It also makes it easier if you get clean data out from exporting in case you wan't to use external simulation tools, ther's no cleanup of unwanted information. But yeah, the AI voice is crap, just get someone to voiceover your videos.

[@petersage5157]

@@thegame4027 Yes, I do approach this from the perspective of a hobbyist/maker. If you're in The Industry(TM) you really shouldn't need this kind of support. Just deselect the layers you don't need when plotting your gerbers and select either aluminum or phenolic or flex or whatever single sided substrate when submitting them. Easy enough to do in KiCad; shouldn't be a problem in Altium Designer. If you're churning something out in the millions, you should know your CAD package's capabilities well enough to not have your fabricobbler bat an eyelash at the gerbers you send them. Of course, "don't forget to call your fabricator" is always an option.