Free or Low Cost Tools for:

1. PCB Designers (see below)
2. Electrical Engineers (see below)
3. Product Development: Links to industry insiders
4. Cost-Effective Internet Marketing Strategy
5. Web Page Authoring

Low cost software for PCB Designers and Electrical Engineers

GCPrevue

GC-Prevueis a great Gerber file viewer for Windows. Our Streamlined PCB Design methods have often used GC-Prevue from Graphicode.

You'll fill out a registration form and then be able to buy and download the latest version.

Here is a TUTORIAL: Assembly drawing plots from Gerber files, using GC-Prevue Version 13 or Higher.

Freeware for PCB Designers and Electrical Engineers

FreeCAD makes a great STEP model Viewer

You can also use FreeCAD for viewing AutoCAD® DXF and DWG drawings

You can use FreeCAD for much more than viewing STEP models. You can get creative with FreeCAD to make 3D STEP models. Altium Designer's on-the-fly 3D model creation is limited. For example, you can't make a toroid for a 3D body using Altium Designer. But you can certainly make one using FreeCAD. FreeCAD is full-featured 3D mechanical drawing software.

It is important to use 3D bodies in Altium Designer with every PCB footprint, because in this way your component clearance checking can be set up to work perfectly. At Golden Gate Graphics, we use a minimum clearance both horizontally and vertically of 11 mils. This value can be adjusted for special cases in your design rules. Because we have a 3D model built into every footprint without exception, Altium's component clearance checking can find clearance errors reliably. This eliminates the need for using IPC courtyards.

AddALL

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