Quickstart Overview
Welcome to PADS Professional App Suite! The PADS Professional App Suite enhances your existing PADS Professional desktop tools, creating a rich product development solution that helps you deliver high-quality products to market faster.
This Quickstart Guide will help navigate you through the PADS Professional App Suite. We'll show you how to better manage and collaborate with your PADS Professional design projects, how to quickly find new part content, and how to build supply chain resilience into your products earlier in the design lifecycle.
Lesson 1: Using Connect to Manage PADS Professional Projects
Connect Overview
The Connect cloud application enables secure design data management and collaboration for your PADS Professional design projects. Its simple and intuitive user interface provides your product team with a single source of truth for design collaboration.
Connect is integrated with PADS Professional so you can take advantage of its capabilities while staying in the desktop environment you're used to using. The simple check in, check out process allows you and your remote teams to access and collaborate on PCB designs.
Log in to the Connect Cloud Application
Open your browser and navigate to https://app.pcbconnect.online. Log in using your trial credentials.
After successful log in, your new collaboration workspace will be need to be provisioned. Once the provisioning process is complete you will be able to access your Connect collaboration workspace.
The first thing you'll see in Connect is an option to take a product tour. Take the product tour to familiarize yourself with the Connect application. The tour also includes links to helpful video tips on how to use Connect.
Now that you're familiar with the Connect cloud application, let's see how it works within the PADS Professional desktop environment.
Update PADS Professional
In order to use Connect you will first need to update PADS Professional to VX.2.8 Update 7 or higher.
Visit Support Center at https://support.sw.siemens.com/ and sign in.
Under Product Centers, select PADS Professional and select Downloads.
Enable Connect in PADS Professional
Open PADS Professional Designer.
From the main toolbar, select File>Data Management Integration>Connect for PADS Professional
A browser tab will open prompting you to log in to Connect (this step may be skipped if you are already logged in).
Close the browser and return to PADS Professional.
From the PADS Professional Start page, select the Open tab. The page will now display the LED Flasher demo project.
Open LED Flasher Cloud Project for Editing
Right click on the LED Flasher project and select Edit Exclusive.
The LED Flasher project will be downloaded from Connect and saved to your local drive for editing.
Once the download is complete you will be able to edit the LED Flasher schematic.
Up Next: Lesson 2 - Using PartQuest to Add New Part Content