- [Instructor] The Layer Stack Manager,
as the name suggests, manages all the information
of the layers within your project.
So, if I just navigate to my Home tab,
and then over on the right-hand side
under my Board Options here, I have Layer Stack Manager.
And that will open my Layer Stack Manager window here.
And you can see I have a little bit of a visual here
on the left-hand side just of all the current layers
being used in my specific project here.
And you can see all of the information given
for those specific layers.
So, fairly intuitive, easy to use here.
So, I can change, edit, delete, or add
really any information here I may need.
So, you can see I have the option
to delete any layers I may not require,
or add additional layers,
as many signal layers as I may need.
In my case, I'm gonna stick pretty much to the defaults,
fairly simple board design here.
Just a two layer board, let's say.
But of course you can add as many layers you may require
for more complicated projects and so on.
Of course, to make edits here,
say, just something as simple as changing a name,
I can just Double Click on this information
and make any text changes I may need.
A specific type, material, or thickness of the layer.
Again, just all the same,
can just Double Click on any of this information here
and edit to suit my own needs here.
Again, I'll just leave pretty much to the basics here.
You can see I can add a few more layers here
and see those come in in here.
So, now I have four signal layers
within this board, as an example.
Or if I'm not happy with those,
I can delete those layers as well that I may no longer need.
So, I'm back to essentially where I started.
And then once I'm happy with all those options, just hit OK.
And once I'm happy with my Layer Stack Manager options,
all my layer information there,
I can also change how I'm gonna be viewing
those layers within my project.
So, to do this I can go into the View Configurations.
A couple ways I can get there.
For one, I can go into the View tab here.
And again over on the right-hand side
under my View options here,
I have the Switch to 3D, I can just hit this dropdown here.
And I have Switch to 2D, so that's gonna be
my 2D view of my board that we're seeing currently.
I also have Switch to 3D,
we can take a quick look at that for a second.
Just get more of a 3D view here,
but there's no real components or anything here,
but we'll look more into this later on.
Alright, we'll jump back to 2D for now
when we're doing the majority of our design.
And then I also have my View Configurations.
And if I just click View Configuration here,
that will jump me into my View Configurations window.
But, a little bit of a shortcut to this,
one I generally do, and just close out here to show,
instead of going through the Ribbons
and everything like that,
just down at the bottom where I see all my layer tabs,
just the left-most one here just showing the current layer.
If I just click on that, it's also going to
pop open my View Configurations window there.
Just a little bit faster for me,
it's kind of the shortcut that I generally use.
And here we just have pretty much
all of our layer information, and we can show, hide,
any of these layers as we may like,
change the colors, and so on.
So again, I'll mostly stick with the defaults here,
but you can see in my simple two signal layer board here,
I just have my top and my bottom layer.
They're both gonna be shown of course in this case.
And here are the two colors I'm using
to show them once we start our board design.
Of course, just click on the color and maybe we just wanted
to change what our top layer color coding may be,
bottom layer, and so on.
And we can do this for all of our other layers as well,
silk screen, mask layers, whatever it may be.
What can also be useful here is our mechanical layers.
Besides anything else that might aid us in our board design.
So, for example, if I wanted to draw a board outline
or I wanted to throw in some dimensioning information
on the board, that type of thing.
I could create a new layer to hold that information.
Of course not gonna be an electrical layer,
so we're calling these mechanical layers here.
And we can see right now I just have outlines
and dimensions turned on or enabled.
But if we want to add additional,
I can just make sure I check off
this Only Show Enabled Mechanical Layers.
Right now it's only showing what I'm actually using.
But if I check that off, it's going to give me
the list of all the potential mechanical layers I can use.
I can use almost 20 to 30 additional mechanical layers
that I can turn on, and I can rename these
to whatever I may need.
So, you can really customize it to suit your exact needs
and throwing a whole bunch of information
on a whole bunch of different layers
to help you with your board designs there.
In this case, I'm only gonna use two for a bit of an outline
and maybe some dimension information,
so I'm gonna keep those two enabled.
So, similarly, you can show, hide, or enable
a whole bunch of layer information,
change the colors, customize to your own needs.
And once happy, just hit Apply and OK.
And what's useful for this as well,
as we'll see more once we actually start
into our board design here,
but you're seeing really all of our layers
down across the bottom here in a number of tabs.
And you can click on each of these tabs
and essentially it's gonna highlight or show
all of the components or all of the information
on that specific layer.
So, if I want only wanna look at my top layer information
or kinda wanna highlight that information,
I can just click on my top layer.
Similarly, now I wanna take a look at or highlight
my bottom layer information, click on Bottom Layer.
Wanna take a look at my overlay information,
click on Top Overlay here.
And I could just easily click on any of these tabs
indicating my layers, and that's just going to
highlight or emphasize that information
so it's easier to see, easier to read for me.