RevTrace - Version Control for Altium Designer

• Overview

Native version-control system for Altium Designer projects. RevTrace was created to replace the team’s previous workflow of storing complete copies of Altium projects in Google Drive and to provide structured version history, branching, comparison and selective restoration directly inside the engineering workflow.

• My contribution

I conceived and developed RevTrace independently in C#/.NET, including the overall architecture, Altium integration, version-control logic, revision comparison, restoration mechanisms, installer and user workflow.

• Engineering highlights

RevTrace supports project history, commits, branching, visual comparison of revisions and selective restoration of design changes. Previous revisions can be opened as working project bases, allowing different features to be developed from different states of the same project and selected changes to be transferred between revisions through the comparison workflow.

The system is integrated directly with Altium Designer rather than operating as a separate external tool. It was tested with Altium Designer 25 and the current production version used by the team.

• Result

RevTrace was adopted by all 5 engineers in my former engineering team and replaced the previous Google Drive–based versioning workflow. It is used for maintaining project history, working with parallel development branches, comparing revisions and restoring individual changes without rolling back an entire project.

The plugin remained in active use at the company after I left.

• Tools / technologies

C#, .NET 6, Altium Designer, Altium extension development, version control, revision management, branching, engineering collaboration.