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There are so many different tools to help design and route PCBs now. You have DeepPCB, Flux, and Quilter doing auto-routing, and SKiDL, CuFlow, and JITX doing p

There are so many different tools to help design and route PCBs now. You have DeepPCB, Flux, and Quilter doing auto-routing, and SKiDL, CuFlow, and JITX doing programmatic schematics (and also sometimes auto-routing?). To be honest, I don't really understand how these tools are differentiated from one another. I personally know the Quilter guys, so if I had to pick I'd use their product, but I don't think the market crowding here is great for anybody.

krasin 3y ago
> I don't think the market crowding here is great for anybody. In the end, the users will win from this crowding, I suppose.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  >In the end, the users will win from this crowding, I suppose. I'm not so sure about that. A while ago I was really excited about Altium introducing CircuitStudio (the first iteration, I think they have a new product with the same name that's completely different). CircuitStudio was pitched as Altium-lite. I paid, I believe, $3000 for it (with some kind of maintenance license?) and absolutely loved it. A year or so later they reached out to me to let me know that they were changing their licensing costs to $900/year or something like that and that they wanted to reward me as an early adopter by giving me a lifetime license. But... the product didn't, as far as I can tell, ever get enough traction to actually become a long-term-viable product. Eagle, at the time, was I think $1000 for a professional license (way before Autodesk bought Eagle). CircuitStudio was, to me, a dramatically better product than Eagle. But where I've ended up with this... I have a perpetual license for a product that stopped getting updates years ago. No one I work with has software that's compatible with it and they can't just buy a license. It's a total albatross that I keep around essentially so that I can open my old designs. New designs? They're in KiCAD now. While I really don't love KiCAD, no one's going to pull the rug out from under me. I can share designs with clients & colleagues and they can open them and work with them. 10 years from now I'll be able to, worst case scenario, run Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM with KiCAD 7 and open the designs (that's assuming KiCAD 37 in 2034 doesn't still have backwards compatibility support :)). Cloud-based ECAD scares me even more. A year or two ago I needed to debug an issue with a super old design for a client. The schematic and board layouts were done in Protel 99SE (Altium Designer before it became Altium). I installed it, opened the design no problem, and extracted the info I needed. Will JITX still be around in 25 years? If they go out of business... what happens to all of my designs? Exporting to PDF and Gerbers is an OK step but doesn't help me at all if I need to actually interact with the design. A crowded market is great for downward pressure on price, but it's really not great for companies to survive long-term in a relatively small niche market.
  - mianos 3y ago
    As the PCB manufacturing industry becomes more accessible to hobbyists and junior engineers through services like JLCPCB and PCBWay, KiCad, despite its limitations compared to professional tools, is gaining popularity. While experienced PCB designers may not prefer KiCad over their professional-grade software, the growing adoption of KiCad by hobbyists and entry-level engineers could lead to its increased presence in the professional sphere as these users progress in their careers and bring their tool preferences with them.
  - gravescale 3y ago
    FYI, KiCAD explicitly guarantees that old designs will always be readable by all future versions.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    > New designs? They're in KiCAD now. While I really don't love KiCAD, no one's going to pull the rug out from under me. I took a different path, but we have arrived in the same place. I have a coupe kicad gripes, but there is no doubt it is getting better all the time…. And for free.
rock_hard 3y ago
Flux founder here Our mission is to take the “hard” out of hardware We have 240k users on the platform…hobbyists, students, small/mid sized teams to Fortune50 companies. We host millions of projects! It’s a huge ecosystem not just of users but also semiconductor manufacturers, fab houses, etc. Think GitHub on steroids! And it’s the only AI first end-to-end design tool in the market…you can go from idea to research to architecture to BOM to schematic to PCB layout and then to manufacturing. Workflows that usually take months in other tools can be done in a few hours to minutes in flux. It’s still early days though but we are moving insanely fast! So if we don’t met your teams bar today I suggest checking back in next month. I think it’s good for more players to enter the market…EDA tooling is stuck somewhere in the 80s and we need to fix that. It’s too expensive and risky to make hardware…and we deserve better!

krasin 3y ago

> I don't think the market crowding here is great for anybody. In the end, the users will win from this crowding, I suppose.

tonyarkles 3y ago
>In the end, the users will win from this crowding, I suppose. I'm not so sure about that. A while ago I was really excited about Altium introducing CircuitStudio (the first iteration, I think they have a new product with the same name that's completely different). CircuitStudio was pitched as Altium-lite. I paid, I believe, $3000 for it (with some kind of maintenance license?) and absolutely loved it. A year or so later they reached out to me to let me know that they were changing their licensing costs to $900/year or something like that and that they wanted to reward me as an early adopter by giving me a lifetime license. But... the product didn't, as far as I can tell, ever get enough traction to actually become a long-term-viable product. Eagle, at the time, was I think $1000 for a professional license (way before Autodesk bought Eagle). CircuitStudio was, to me, a dramatically better product than Eagle. But where I've ended up with this... I have a perpetual license for a product that stopped getting updates years ago. No one I work with has software that's compatible with it and they can't just buy a license. It's a total albatross that I keep around essentially so that I can open my old designs. New designs? They're in KiCAD now. While I really don't love KiCAD, no one's going to pull the rug out from under me. I can share designs with clients & colleagues and they can open them and work with them. 10 years from now I'll be able to, worst case scenario, run Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM with KiCAD 7 and open the designs (that's assuming KiCAD 37 in 2034 doesn't still have backwards compatibility support :)). Cloud-based ECAD scares me even more. A year or two ago I needed to debug an issue with a super old design for a client. The schematic and board layouts were done in Protel 99SE (Altium Designer before it became Altium). I installed it, opened the design no problem, and extracted the info I needed. Will JITX still be around in 25 years? If they go out of business... what happens to all of my designs? Exporting to PDF and Gerbers is an OK step but doesn't help me at all if I need to actually interact with the design. A crowded market is great for downward pressure on price, but it's really not great for companies to survive long-term in a relatively small niche market.
- mianos 3y ago
  As the PCB manufacturing industry becomes more accessible to hobbyists and junior engineers through services like JLCPCB and PCBWay, KiCad, despite its limitations compared to professional tools, is gaining popularity. While experienced PCB designers may not prefer KiCad over their professional-grade software, the growing adoption of KiCad by hobbyists and entry-level engineers could lead to its increased presence in the professional sphere as these users progress in their careers and bring their tool preferences with them.
- gravescale 3y ago
  FYI, KiCAD explicitly guarantees that old designs will always be readable by all future versions.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  > New designs? They're in KiCAD now. While I really don't love KiCAD, no one's going to pull the rug out from under me. I took a different path, but we have arrived in the same place. I have a coupe kicad gripes, but there is no doubt it is getting better all the time…. And for free.

rock_hard 3y ago

Flux founder here Our mission is to take the “hard” out of hardware We have 240k users on the platform…hobbyists, students, small/mid sized teams to Fortune50 companies. We host millions of projects! It’s a huge ecosystem not just of users but also semiconductor manufacturers, fab houses, etc. Think GitHub on steroids! And it’s the only AI first end-to-end design tool in the market…you can go from idea to research to architecture to BOM to schematic to PCB layout and then to manufacturing. Workflows that usually take months in other tools can be done in a few hours to minutes in flux. It’s still early days though but we are moving insanely fast! So if we don’t met your teams bar today I suggest checking back in next month. I think it’s good for more players to enter the market…EDA tooling is stuck somewhere in the 80s and we need to fix that. It’s too expensive and risky to make hardware…and we deserve better!