I am working on a prototype of a project and it involves an antenna. This means that I will probably have to tune this first version a little bit once I get it assembled. To do this, I wanted to place into my circuit a "dummy" capacitor. I realize that I could make a pads in the CAD with the right dimensions, but this wouldn't show up in the schematic. Also, I have seen in schematics capacitors with DNP values. This is what I am essentially looking for. Is there an easy way to do this/best practice? I am a student trying to learn the right way to accomplish these tasks..
Electronic – How to specify a capacitor in Altium schematic as DNP
altiumschematics
Related Solutions
I had a very similar problem. I found one simpler solution, maybe not entirely elegant, but it works.
You can make the rectangles any color you want, with any color border you want and any of several (four) border width selections. See below (dialog from Properties):
There are 256 colors available, with selectable swatches, including 16 custom colors that you can specify in 8-bit per color RGB or 8-bit per parameter HSL (Hue-Saturation-Luminance) format.
Best Answer
The correct way to do this is with variants, as others have pointed out. Do not use the 'Type' property. For every project I have a variant named "Only Populated Components" which makes it super easy to DNP components. Not populated components should NOT appear on the BOM, as this will indubitably lead to questions from the CM. They should also not appear on the PCBA assembly drawing.
A good sanity check to see what is populated and what is not is to view the PCBA in 3D; you can tell at a glance which components are missing.