| FreePCB User Guide | Version 1.2

PREV | Table of Contents | NEXT

7. Tutorial (continued)

7.2 Creating the Project

First we will create a new project called "Motor".

- Select New from the File menu. The following dialog should appear.

- Enter the word "motor" in the Name box. This establishes the name of the project.
- Since the project folder normally has the same name as the project, "motor" will be automatically added to the end of the folder path in the Project Folder box, which should now read "..\projects\motor". Note that this path is relative to the location of the application, which is normally in FreePCB\bin. If you wanted to use some other folder as the project folder, you can override the default by entering a different folder path, which can be either relative to the application folder or absolute. If the project folder doesn't already exist, FreePCB will create it (although its parent folder must exist). Since the "motor" project folder already exists and contains the netlist file for the motor controller, I would suggest leaving this path alone.
- Similarly, you can override the path to the Library Folder, which contains the footprint libraries. If you did a standard installation of FreePCB this should not be necessary.
- If you decide to move your folders around, you can change the default paths by editing the file default.cfg in the application folder. If you move the library folder after creating the project, you can edit the library path in the project file motor.fpc.
- Leave the number of copper layers at "4".
- The Default trace and via widths will be applied to any net or trace which doesn't have widths explicitly assigned. Since we will be using 10 mils as our default trace width, you can leave them alone..
- The Menu of trace and via widths is a list of values which will be presented if you explicitly assign trace or net widths later on. You are not limited to using these values, but using a selection from the menu is convenient and reduces the chance of error. If you know that you will be using certain widths which are not on the default menu, you can add them by clicking on Add. You can also delete items which you know you will not be using with Delete, or change an item by selecting it and clicking Edit.
- In this tutorial, we will be using trace widths of 10 and 15 mils. Select each of the other widths in the menu and Delete them.
- Autosave will automatically save your project periodically. Enable it and set the save Interval to 5 minutes.
- Now your dialog should look like:

- Click OK to exit the dialog.
- The title bar of the FreePCB window should now read "FreePCB - motor.fpc*", where motor.fpc is the name of the project file that you will be creating. The asterisk indicates that the project has been modified and the information has not been saved. To make sure that you can save the file, select Save from the File menu (or press ctrl-s). FreePCB will write the file, and the asterisk will disappear.
- If you want to look at the project file, you can open motor.fpc with a text editor such as NotePad. You will see that there is an [options] section of the file containing the options that you set , along with some other default options. Most of the other sections of the file, such as [shapes], [parts], etc. will be empty.
- In the next section, we will start designing our PCB by importing the netlist file.

PREV | Table of Contents | NEXT