C Is For Coffee

For more Altium practice I decided to revive an older project I built from second year:

It was a simple inductor tethered robot with some h-bridges.

With some slight changes to the circuit, the result looks like the following:

The first layout iteration looked like:

With some updates to the part footprints, size and adding polygon pour for ground, the board now looks like:

The reason for doing a polygon pour is to reduce the amount of noise from the ground loop as there are a two 1mH inductors transmitting AM signals. I also added 4 mounting holes to the board. Overall there is still a lot to be optimized for the board, but I wanted to move on to trying the 3d output function of Altium.

Sadly, it seemed that though the rendering in Altium was pretty with the copper and black PCB. Once outputted to a .step file, the model is now bland, boring and barely recognizable:

I tried to figure out how to change the 3d footprint of components, but it seemed easier to just insert the components in Solidworks. Since, the main thing I wanted to do was to build a simple enclosure around it, I just needed some of the major components placed.