Quickstart Overview
In Chapter One you learned about the powerful capabilities PADS Professional Premium delivers. Chapter Two introduces the cloud native apps that extend PADS Professional Premium beyond your desktop – creating a rich product development ecosystem that helps you deliver high-quality products to market faster. These "cloud apps" are included with PADS Professional Premium edition.
Connect for PADS Professional makes it easy to manage and collaborate with your team on design projects. PartQuest Portal helps you quickly find new part content to reduce time needed for library creation. PartQuest Supply Chain enables you to build supply chain resilience into your products earlier in the design lifecycle, directly from within PADS Professional tools.
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, your remote team, and other product stakeholders 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.2.11 Update 4 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.