Setting up OrCAD for project success - OrCAD Tutorial

- Now let's install orCAD Lite on your computer. Go to your favorite search engine, and type in orCAD Lite download. It should come up as your top three or first result. Just depends. And then click on Free orCAD Lite Download. Now, why did we use the search engine? It's because sometimes this orCAD Lite software has a different link to access it. Now, just go ahead and click this X. If you see advertisement for orCAD trial, you want to ignore that. For this course, you just need the lite version of this software. You know you're here when it says Free orCAD Lite Download, PSpice Designer Lite and PCB Designer Lite. Go down here and fill in your information, like first name, last name, and make sure you get everything correct down to the bottom. And be sure you click "I'm not a robot." Once you've entered all this information, you'll get a link that gets sent to the email you put in here. And that link will help the download. Now, make sure you download it, and ensure you have a strong internet connection because the download is about 2.5 gigabytes. Once the software has been downloaded, then go ahead and install it. Now, go to the Start menu, just to double check that the software installed correctly. Scroll down to orCAD Trial, if you installed the trial software, anyway. But you should see orCAD Lite here. And you would see Capture CIS Lite and PCB Editor Lite. It's very important. Open up Capture CIS. You'll know the software is installed correctly when your Capture and PCB Editor programs start. So just like you did with Capture CIS Lite, PCB Editor Lite should open as well. Now, let's make sure we know where the software programs are in the systems folders. Navigate to the Installation Directory. So, to do that, go to your Start Menu. Type in File Explorer. Then go to this PC Windows C. The Cadence software does not install in program files or in the 86 folder. It actually installs in its own folder in the C Drive. So go to Cadence, SPB_17.2, Tools. Bin. And this folder has all the software programs that come with the orCAD Suite. Here's Allegro. And there's Capture. Okay, so they installed it in the correct directories. Now, let's check to see if our system environment variables are set up. So go to your Windows Start Menu again. Type in Environment. And you should see Edit the System Environment Variables. So click on that. Then go to Environment Variables. Now select this path folder here. Choose to edit it. We're going to add these software programs to our direct path, so we can pull them up from a command line or wherever. So this is a little shortcut to execute these programs. Choose New, then Browse. And you will navigate to the same folder that we found earlier. This PC, scroll down to Windows C. Cadence. Tools. Select the Bin folder because this houses all the main software programs. Click OK. And that's it. So click OK again. Then click OK one more time. And click OK. Now I'm going to test this. Go to Window Start Menu again. And type CMD for Command Prompt. Let's pull that up. Now, what we should be able to do is just type in Capture.exe and it should open. And there it is. It opens just like that. Now, let's test it with PCP Editor. Allegro.exe and we open another instance of PCD Editor. Great. That verifies that our environment variables setup works. Now that everything is set up, go ahead and download your exercise files. But you have to place them in very specific locations. So first of all, the zip folder that says footprint symbols, you want to right click that and extract all the files into a folder. Okay, so here are all our footprint files. You would select all of them just as they are. Right click. Choose copy. Now navigate to this location. That's C, CadenceSPP_17.2. And the rest of it in symbols. Go ahead, right click and hit paste. It'll ask if you want to replace some files in the destination. Verify you want to do that. And it's fine. Let's do the same with our other folders. This step folder here, extracted. Select all the step files. Right click and copy. And you want to past these files into this directory. So go ahead and paste those. And finally, this file here is a library file with a .olb extension. But you may or may not see it on your system. So click on this little arrow here. Choose view. And choose to show the file name extensions by hitting that check mark. Now you will see it's an OLB file. You would right click this. Hit copy. And save it in this directory. Right click. Hit paste. And there you go. You want your .olb file right there. All right. That's the final step and we are done. Now that you have your setup done correctly, you are ready to process your entire design workflow with the greatest of ease.