Altium Designer gives you a high degree of control over design rules for guiding track work and placement, but there are often situations where you need to measure clearances and distances between objects on the PCB – or even a library component you’re checking or creating.
To get a quick and exact measurement between the centres of two objects, use the distance tool by going to Reports, Measure Distance or use the shortcut CTRL+M. It’s then just a matter of clicking the first object’s centre, then the second object’s centre to nominate the two measurement points.
If the object is a polygon or region, the measure tool will snap to the edge of the object, otherwise you’ll see it snap to the centre when the white octagon appears. If you don’t want it to snap to object centres and prefer to have just a simple measurement between two mouse clicks, hold down the control key.
In all cases an information dialog appears showing an overall distance value, with the X Distance and Y Distance values displayed accurate to two decimal places.
A similar (and very useful) tool is provided that shows you the minimum clearance between two objects. If that’s what you want to see, click Reports, Measure Primitives, and then click the first and the second object – what you’ll see in the dialog is the exact clearance between the objects.
The tool’s measurement units are determined by Altium Designer’s System Units, as chosen for the document settings (Design » Document Options). If the dialog does not include measurement units, it means that the document is currently set to use DXP default units, where 1 unit is 10 mils. You can switch to Imperial or Metric units by toggling the System units (View » Toggle Units).
While you are placing objects or routing the PCB, you can also see exactly where your pointer is on the board insight display. What’s more, it also shows the delta – in other words the Cartesian distance since the last mouse left-click. This gives you the ability to control the mouse with exact accuracy to the current grid, and is particularly useful for making simple board outlines or rectangular objects.
And if you want to put the mouse at a specific location, hit J to bring up the Jump command – as you expect, this lets you jump to a specific X and/or Y location. Also, you can use the CTRL+Home and CTRL+End shortcuts for getting back to Absolute or Relative Origins.
Finally, if you have to regularly jump to the same few locations around the board, you can add some Location Marks. For example, you might want to make the centre of a Mounting Hole a mark that’s easy get back to – in that case, select J, Set Location Mark, 1, and click the centre of the mounting hole. Now whenever you hit J then M (for Mark) then 1, the mouse is instantly relocated to right in the middle of that mounting hole.
