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Hands-On PC Board Design For Beginners; Pt.1 Want to get started in PC board design? Here’s how to download, install and configure the free Autotrax design software. By PETER SMITH O VER THE PAST FEW months, our PC Board Design Tutorial series has provided a good look at the technologies and processes involved in PC board design and manufacture. Along the way, we’ve also recommended a number of guidelines applicable to actual board design, such as grid spacings, track widths, and much more. Many of our readers have indicated that they are now ready to “have a go” at their first design but are not sure where to start. Over the next month or two, we hope to provide enough “hands on” information for you to bring your first design into reality. Which software? Undoubtedly the most common question we’re asked is “which PC board design software should I use?” There’s simply no universal answer to this question; there are literally dozens Fig.1: run ATX161ND.EXE at a DOS prompt to extract the Autotrax installation files. 8  Silicon Chip of products on the market, with varying features and price tags. However, we strongly believe that you should “try before you buy”. All reputable products are available in shareware or demonstration versions, allowing you to make sure that you’re getting exactly what you need before reaching for your wallet. However, if you’re a beginner to PC board design, then it’s difficult to know precisely what you need. In addition, if you don’t plan to produce many boards, then you probably don’t want to pay much (if anything!) for the software anyway. Well, the EDA software experts Altium (formerly Protel Technology) have come to the rescue. They’ve recently made the most popular DOS-based PC board design software available free! Autotrax for gratis! Autotrax and its earlier cousin Easytrax are two of the most widely known EDA software packages on the planet. After all, they were among the first EDA applications written for the IBM PC. This popularity brings with it a host of benefits. For a start, designs produced in Autotrax will be accepted in their native format by most PC board manufacturers, particularly here in Australia. It also means that many professional designers as well as experienced amateurs cut their teeth on this product, so finding help when you need it is usually not too difficult! www.siliconchip.com.au Although DOS-based, Autotrax can be made to work on all versions of Windows without too much difficulty. Despite the fact that the user interface is definitely not like Windows, the uncluttered menus and keyboard shortcuts make it quite easy to master. In fact, many users swear by the product (and hey, the price is right!). Although Autotrax doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles available on high-priced Windows-based alternatives, it can handle all but the most complex designs. It includes features like 8-layer design, component library editing and simple autorouting. Getting your copy Autotrax can be obtained from Altium’s software download page at www.protel.com.au/resources/ downloads. Scroll down towards the bottom of the page until you find the section headed “Freeware”. When you click on the “Autotrax” link, you will be presented with Altium’s license agreement. Right click on the link at the foot of this page and select “Save Target As…” to download the Autotrax file (ATX161ND.EXE). While you’re there, grab a copy of the “EasyAuto” utility. This will enable you to quickly convert PC boards designs created in Easytrax to Autotrax format. Fig.2: the first screen of the simple installation program. All you have to change here is the “Source Drive” entry, which should be “C” rather than “A”. Fig.3: the final step in the installer is to select the desired graphics driver. Use the down-arrow key to highlight the “VGA 640x480” entry and press Enter. Installation Being a DOS-based application, Autotrax does not include the usual “point & click” installation program. Nevertheless, installation is quite straightforward if you follow the steps presented below. To begin, place a copy of the downloaded file in the root directory (\) of your hard disk drive. We put ours in C:\ for the following examples. ATX161ND.EXE is a self-extracting zip file; all you need to do is execute it and the contents will be automatically extracted into the root directory. To do this, open a Command Prompt and type in the following commands: C: CD\ ATX161ND.EXE Eight new files will be created in the root directory, as shown in Fig.1. Still at the Command Prompt, type www.siliconchip.com.au in INSTALL.EXE and press the <Enter> key to launch the installer program (Fig.2). In the menu that appears, change the “Source Drive” entry from “A” to “C” and press the <Enter> key three times, accepting the remaining defaults. This will install all the main PC board design (Traxedit) files in the C:\AUTOTRAX directory. Following the first menu, three similar menus allow you install the utilities, printing/plotting program (Traxplot) and associated drivers, as well as the graphics drivers. Accept the suggested defaults in all of these menus. The final menu allows you to choose a graphics driver to suit your video card and monitor (Fig.3). Select the “VGA 640 x 480” entry from the list for now; we’ll describe how to use higher screen resolutions a little further on. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see an “Installation Completed” message. As indicated by the message, a little “fine tuning” is required before launching Autotrax for the first time, so let’s do that next. Configuration During the installation, a directory called GRAPHDRV was created to contain all of the supported graphics drivers. Of these, only the basic VGA driver is required, along with the simple GRAPHSET utility used to switch display modes. Let’s tidy things up at little! Using Windows Explorer, open the C:\GRAPHDRV directory and copy the following files from there into the C:\AUTOTRAX directory: GRAPH.DRV VGA640.DRV GRAPHSET.EXE After you’ve copied the files, delete the entire C:\GRAPHDRV directory. The next job is to modify the DOS February 2004  9 Hands-On PC Board Design – continued Fig.4: the path variable is modified via the System icon in Control Panel under Windows 2000 & XP. Remember to click on the “OK” button to save your changes. search path so that it includes our remaining two directories. For Windows 95/98 & Me, this can be achieved by editing the C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT file. To do this, right-click on the AUTOEXEC.BAT in Windows Explorer and choose “Edit” from the context menu. This automatically opens the file in Notepad for editing. The contents will vary according to your PC’s configuration. However, all you need to do is add the following line so that it appears after any existing lines beginning with the “PATH” statement: PATH=%PATH%;C:\ AUTOTRAX;C:\TRAXPLOT Experienced DOS users will know that you can also add these two paths to the existing “PATH” statement. Either method will work OK. Remember to save the changes using File -> Save before closing Notepad. To modify the path in Windows 2000 and XP, open Control Panel from the Start menu and double-click on the “System” icon. Next, click on the “Advanced” tab and then the “Environment Variables” button. The “Environment Variables” dialog box appears (Fig.4). Highlight the PATH variable and click on the Edit button. Now add the following string to the end of the existing variable value: ;C:\AUTOTRAX;C:\TRAXPLOT 10  Silicon Chip To check that your path modification was successful, restart Windows (not required for 2000 & XP), open a Command Prompt, type in “PATH” and press <Enter>. On our Windows XP system, the result looked like this (yours may differ, but you get the idea): C:\>path PATH=C:\WINDOWS\System32;C:\ WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\ AUTOTRAX;C:\TRAXPLOT Important: none of the paths in the “PATH” statement should exceed 56 characters in length. If they do, Autotrax could behave erroneously. For more information on this limitation, check out the Airborn Electronics web site page www.airborn.com.au/layout/ ntvdm.html Desktop icons The Autotrax package consists of two main applications, namely “Traxedit” and “Traxplot”. Traxedit is used for creating your PC board design, whereas Traxplot is used to print out the design and generate files for manufacturing. It’s quite a simple matter to add icons to your desktop for both of these applications. To add an icon for Traxedit, start Windows Explorer and navigate to the C:\AUTOTRAX directory. Drag and drop the TRAXEDIT.EXE file from the Explorer window to your desktop or right click on the file and choose “Create Shortcut”. With the latter method, you’ll need to cut and paste the new shortcut onto your desktop. Next, right-click on the shortcut and choose “Properties”. Select the “Screen” tab and under the “Usage” field, click on the “Full-screen” option (see Fig.5). All the remaining (default) settings are generally fine, so click on the OK button to close the Properties box. Repeat the above procedure to create a shortcut for TRAXPLOT.EXE in the C:\TRAXPLOT directory. Test time! OK, you’re all set to go! Double-click on the Traxedit icon and the Windows desktop should disappear, replaced with the “Protel Autotrax” opening screen. Hit any key to get to the main screen, where you’ll be prompted to open a file for editing. The default file name is shown as *.PCB. If you simply hit <Enter>, you’ll get a list of the demo designs included in the TRAXEDIT directory. The main menu can be displayed at any time by hitting <Enter>. If that doesn’t work, you may be in edit mode – simply hit the <Esc> key to exit edit mode first. Many commands within Traxedit can be actioned with just a single keystroke. Where possible, this is the first letter of the command. For example, to close Traxedit, you can either select File -> Quit from the main menu or press <F> followed by <Q>. As with other MS-DOS programs, you can suspend Traxedit and switch to Windows to perform other tasks. To do this, hold down <Alt> and press <Enter>, or use <Alt + Tab> to switch between active tasks. You can also use the “Windows” key if your keyboard has one. Display resolution If you plan to do a lot of work in Autotrax, then increasing the screen resolution to something higher than the standard 640x480 pixels can make life a lot easier. With higher resolutions, you can see more of your board at any one time; there’s a lot less need to continually zoom and pan around. The higher resolution drivers included with Autotrax were intended for use with specific video cards, the majority of which have long-since www.siliconchip.com.au resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. You can download these free of charge from www.airborn.com.au/layout/ easytrax.html Unzipping the drivers Fig.5: after creating a shortcut icon to Traxedit, you need to go to the Screen tab in the Traxedit shortcut properties dialog and select “Full-screen” usage. You then repeat this procedure for the Traxplot shortcut. been recycled (we hope!). However, help is at hand! Steven Murray of Airborn Electronics has made available a complete set of drivers for All the drivers are contained in a single file named EASYVIDEO.ZIP. Simply unzip the contents of this file into your C:\AUTOTRAX directory and run the GRAPHSET.EXE utility to switch resolutions. In the unlikely event that you experience problems with the drivers, you’ll find a host of useful information on Steve’s site. Well, that’s about all we have room for this month. We hope to bring you more on Autotrax in upcoming issues, including how to create your own components libraries, design a simple PC board and print out the results from Windows. Credits Our thanks to Steven Murray of Airborn Electronics for making his updated Easytrax/Autotrax video drivers freely available. You’ll also find a plethora of common-sense information on the RCS Radio web site at www.rcsradio.com.au, courtesy of SC Bob Barnes. 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Available from SILICON CHIP Mail order prices: Aust: $14.95 (incl. GST & P&P) NZ/Asia Pacific: $18.00 via airmail Rest of World: $21.50 via airmail Order by phoning (02) 9979 5644 & quoting your credit card number; or fax the details to (02) 9979 6503; or mail your order with cheque or credit card details to Silicon Chip Publications, PO Box 139, Collaroy, NSW 2097. www.siliconchip.com.au February 2004  11