8 ms·

CircuitMaker: a free PCB design tool powered by Altium

108 points by unwind 12y ago

allegory 12y ago
I've dealt with Altium before. In fact I was responsible for licensing their product at a large manufacturing company. There is no such thing as free. There has to be a catch. They are expert milkers.
- kitd 12y ago
  On page 2 there's "CircuitMaker will be free to start" and you pay for extensions to handle more complexity. So it probably comes down to what is core and what is an extension.
- fr4 12y ago
  I agree, but Altium Designer really is very, very good and has been built over almost 30 years. Unfortunately FOSS tools come nowhere near it.
  - stinos 12y ago
    This. I've used a couple of packages and AD is at the top of the line. Design is a pretty difficult problem to solve which is one of the reasons FOSS, which is usually created by a limited amount volunteers in their free time especially for niche branches (i.e. not like a kernel for instance), has trouble catching up with the work of larger amounts of full-time paid jobs which are focused on just one thing.
- michaelt 12y ago
  Altium announced the intention to launch a lower-end tool (along with a new pricing model) a while back [1]. Presumably it's an entry-level product following a pricing model like EAGLE; limits to commercial use/board size/number of components/ layers/connections /schematic sheets. [1] http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-designer-new-pricing-model-and-high-end-low-end-tool-in-development/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-designer-new-pric...
nwh 12y ago
It's free as in "freemium". Unusable unless you spend a tonne of money on lots of little in-app purchases.
- unwind 12y ago
  Perhaps, I guess it's hard to be that certain about whether or not it's going to be unusable before it's available. I have no experience with Altium at all, I found this via Twitter and through the EEVblog where it's been mentioned since the guy running the blog seems to have hope/interest in it. For me it'll probably not be very interesting, since I totally expect it to be Windows only. What do folks with experience with Altium's products think?
jdswain 12y ago
I guess it's too early to tell, but I'm hopeful that this will be good. We don't know what the in-app purchases will be, or the price for them, but a basic version of Altium for a low cost would be really nice. Personally I don't mind paying something for this, but I can't justify anywhere near the cost of full Altium for hobby projects. If I have to pay for a few features that's fine.
- danellis 12y ago
  I'm hoping the paid extras are things most hobbyists won't need, like simulation and RF design tools.
jpwright 12y ago
I work with PCB design tools a lot -- Cadence, Altium, Eagle, you name it. While there's definitely room for better software, the most frustrating thing about the PCB CAD ecosystem right now is (a) lack of interoperability between file formats (for schematic, layout, and gerbers), and (b) lack of publicly accessible components. It is a huge pain to build tons of component symbols and footprints for each design. There are large EE companies that employ people just for this task! The idea of paying for more extensions seems incredibly frustrating. I'd rather know what the cost will be upfront. I am hopeful that eventually someone will clearly win this market by creating/updating good, free software, in combination with open/convertible file formats, a huge component database, and monetize via paid access to special components/automatic component creation, or an integrated manufacturing solution.
- csirac2 12y ago
  Agree, I'm 80% software these days but ~8 years ago I discovered Eagle and found it was a huge relief at the time coming from Protel (now Altium). I've been getting my feet wet again; perhaps Altium has fixed the UX which drove me away originally but they don't seem (until now?) to have had any entry-level appropriate pricing. And whilst I could pick up Eagle 7 recently and get productive again real quick, the fact that I still had to draw my own PCB footprints which are intrinsically inseparable from the overall component definition is so disappointing. A separate PCB footprint library, separate in the sense that component packages should be normalized and trivially re-usable across devices without error-prone copy-pasta madness seemed painfully obvious 10 years ago and it's still painfully obvious now. Drawing a new schematic symbol and wiring that up to physical pins in a PCB footprint is no big deal, but I just hate having to draw a new PCB footprint from a datasheet. Even on the off-chance that you can copy-paste from some other device with similar enough package, you still end up with inconsistent silkscreen/gate naming conventions etc. because each part library author does things differently.
  - chillingeffect 12y ago
    You guys are both right. The incompatibility b/t PCB design tools and resources is farcical. Unfortunately, software like web frameworks and office productivity gets so many more eyeballs than PCB design software. The market size of PCB design software is small. A single copy of gEDA/Altium/Eagle/Orcad/Kicad can produce a piece of hardware that one billion people use. You could say the same for a single copy of Word, but people own and interact with thousands of different documents, but only a handful to a dozen PCBs and most people are using the same ones (iPhone, laptop motherboard, etc.). As more hobbyists engage at the Arduino level, simple, free tools can open up a bit... but professional stuff will still suffer severe inertial effects - the value of a single PCB design program is simply too huge. I don't see this free(asterisk) offering from Altium as any more than a freemium pattern to divert marketshare from Eagle in particular. I use Eagle, but the EEs at work say Altium is full of bugs. Its 3d board viewer is a gimmick that hooks a lot of people, but it's not as critical as having the proper components. p.s. for simple PCB design, there are numerous free tools: http://www.electroschematics.com/2249/pcb-design-software/ http://www.electroschematics.com/2249/pcb-design-software/ and here's a brief overview of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_EDA_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_EDA_software
sgt 12y ago
Will it be a web-based app or will it be a desktop application? If so, does anyone know if it will run on OS X? A lot of the software tools in electronics and circuit design seem to be Windows centric.
- kasbah 12y ago
  Dave Jones said on the AmpHour podcast that it will be a Windows program but files have to be stored online. Sounds like a deal breaker really.
  - NextPerception 12y ago
    It looks like a stripped down version of their professional Altium design suite which is indeed a Windows program.
illumen 12y ago
How does this compare to Fritzing? http://fritzing.org/home/ http://fritzing.org/home/
- andyjohnson0 12y ago
  Hard to tell, since CircuitMaker is apparently not available yet. I like Fritzing. I'm just a hobbyist, but having tried other PCB layout tools (Eagle, etc), Fritzing is the only one I've actually been able to be productive with.
  - fallingmeat 12y ago
    Tried upverter?
    - andyjohnson0 12y ago
      Looks interesting, and I'll probably give it a try-out. But it seems to store all design data in the "cloud" without the option to export it out, which means I'd be unlikely to use it.
      - zakhomuth 12y ago
        Yes - The default is to stroe your data in the cloud. But you can always download all of your designs in an open well documented json format.
        lumpypua 12y ago
        Does anything else have the capability to work with the json format? Or what can I convert it into?
        zakhomuth 12y ago
        See here: https://github.com/upverter/schematic-file-converter https://github.com/upverter/schematic-file-converter
userbinator 12y ago
This could be an attempt to capture some percentage of the userbase that would've pirated Altium for personal use/learning, as is common for other large expensive software e.g. Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc.
gioele 12y ago
Slightly offtopic: are there PCB design tools that are _text_ based? I would prefer to _program_ a design, rather than _drawing_ it.
- csirac2 12y ago
  There's netlist files for schematics, but they're a bit raw to do by hand... Each PCB design package has its own programming language, here's an example of what you can do with Eagle's ULP: http://irq5.io/2013/03/30/circular-layout-ulp-for-eagle/ http://irq5.io/2013/03/30/circular-layout-ulp-for-eagle/ Edit: I suppose you're talking about something more declarative like Eg. povray scripts, I'm not aware of such a thing. Edit2: Eagle's .brd/.sch files are actually XML, FWIW, and from the git diffs I've done from time to time between commits - almost human readable (but perhaps not human writable). Edit3: Agree with jimmyswimmy, there are so many compromises, trade-offs and optimizations going on which (for me at least) require the visual cues when placing parts and routing traces. Sometimes even the 2D visualization on the screen seems inadequate, when you get a board fabbed and see it assembled & fitted, sometimes you have that... oh damn, I wish I had seen it like that, I would have done X.
- jimmyswimmy 12y ago
  This is hard to understand. A PCB is fundamentally a graphical design. I would think you would need to see it to understand what it's doing. There are no fixed references in a PCB design as there are on a page of paper (which will always have an upper-left corner to reference everything from). On the other hand, the schematic requires no graphical representation and is easily written as a netlist. SPICE works in netlists and most (all?) PCB packages import a netlist. If you wish to represent a schematic as code, that's the way to do it. My initial opinion notwithstanding, if you write a program to let me compile gerbers from code, I'll try my hand at writing a PCB out.
- joshvm 12y ago
  Then essentially you want to write an autorouter. Modern autorouting is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly stupid. You really need to know exactly when to use it and how to set it up so that it fulfills all your design requirements. Part of the point of PCB design is that it's a _design_ process. You need to make executive decisions about where you can place those components. Things like connectors and interfaces absolutely need to be manually placed (or at least have defined locations). In principle what you're asking is simple - you pass in the netlist and manually place important components and then let the autorouter do the rest. In practice you have to think about: - Grounding schemes - Differential traces - Thermal management - Isolation - Analog/Digital separation - Grounding/stitch vias - Potential room for expansion in the future so board revisions have minimal impact Don't forget that at least some of PCB design is 'artistic'. Your boards should be beautiful!
st3fan 12y ago
This looks cool. But is it Windows-only?
- Zuph 12y ago
  Per Dave Jones (http://www.eevblog.com/ http://www.eevblog.com/), yes.
NextPerception 12y ago
We use Altium daily at my office and the overwhelming consensus is that we wish they would fix a lot of the bugs in Altium instead of spending time and effort supporting a whole other program. You don't adopt another pet when you have trouble remembering to feed your first pet.
proee 12y ago
We just released a new desktop version of "PCBWeb Designer" http://www.pcbweb.com http://www.pcbweb.com This is a huge improvement of our original tool that relied on silverlight. The project is a WPF application written in c# on .net - so right now it's windows only. We are exploring options to port to other platforms using Xamarin. The tool is 100% free, with no limits on size or parts and includes full gerber output.

108 points by unwind 12y ago

I've dealt with Altium before. In fact I was responsible for licensing their product at a large manufacturing company. There is no such thing as free. There has to be a catch. They are expert milkers.

kitd 12y ago
On page 2 there's "CircuitMaker will be free to start" and you pay for extensions to handle more complexity. So it probably comes down to what is core and what is an extension.
fr4 12y ago
I agree, but Altium Designer really is very, very good and has been built over almost 30 years. Unfortunately FOSS tools come nowhere near it.
- stinos 12y ago
  This. I've used a couple of packages and AD is at the top of the line. Design is a pretty difficult problem to solve which is one of the reasons FOSS, which is usually created by a limited amount volunteers in their free time especially for niche branches (i.e. not like a kernel for instance), has trouble catching up with the work of larger amounts of full-time paid jobs which are focused on just one thing.
michaelt 12y ago
Altium announced the intention to launch a lower-end tool (along with a new pricing model) a while back [1]. Presumably it's an entry-level product following a pricing model like EAGLE; limits to commercial use/board size/number of components/ layers/connections /schematic sheets. [1] http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-designer-new-pricing-model-and-high-end-low-end-tool-in-development/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-designer-new-pric...

nwh 12y ago

It's free as in "freemium". Unusable unless you spend a tonne of money on lots of little in-app purchases.

unwind 12y ago
Perhaps, I guess it's hard to be that certain about whether or not it's going to be unusable before it's available. I have no experience with Altium at all, I found this via Twitter and through the EEVblog where it's been mentioned since the guy running the blog seems to have hope/interest in it. For me it'll probably not be very interesting, since I totally expect it to be Windows only. What do folks with experience with Altium's products think?

jdswain 12y ago

I guess it's too early to tell, but I'm hopeful that this will be good. We don't know what the in-app purchases will be, or the price for them, but a basic version of Altium for a low cost would be really nice. Personally I don't mind paying something for this, but I can't justify anywhere near the cost of full Altium for hobby projects. If I have to pay for a few features that's fine.

danellis 12y ago
I'm hoping the paid extras are things most hobbyists won't need, like simulation and RF design tools.

jpwright 12y ago

I work with PCB design tools a lot -- Cadence, Altium, Eagle, you name it. While there's definitely room for better software, the most frustrating thing about the PCB CAD ecosystem right now is (a) lack of interoperability between file formats (for schematic, layout, and gerbers), and (b) lack of publicly accessible components. It is a huge pain to build tons of component symbols and footprints for each design. There are large EE companies that employ people just for this task! The idea of paying for more extensions seems incredibly frustrating. I'd rather know what the cost will be upfront. I am hopeful that eventually someone will clearly win this market by creating/updating good, free software, in combination with open/convertible file formats, a huge component database, and monetize via paid access to special components/automatic component creation, or an integrated manufacturing solution.

csirac2 12y ago
Agree, I'm 80% software these days but ~8 years ago I discovered Eagle and found it was a huge relief at the time coming from Protel (now Altium). I've been getting my feet wet again; perhaps Altium has fixed the UX which drove me away originally but they don't seem (until now?) to have had any entry-level appropriate pricing. And whilst I could pick up Eagle 7 recently and get productive again real quick, the fact that I still had to draw my own PCB footprints which are intrinsically inseparable from the overall component definition is so disappointing. A separate PCB footprint library, separate in the sense that component packages should be normalized and trivially re-usable across devices without error-prone copy-pasta madness seemed painfully obvious 10 years ago and it's still painfully obvious now. Drawing a new schematic symbol and wiring that up to physical pins in a PCB footprint is no big deal, but I just hate having to draw a new PCB footprint from a datasheet. Even on the off-chance that you can copy-paste from some other device with similar enough package, you still end up with inconsistent silkscreen/gate naming conventions etc. because each part library author does things differently.
- chillingeffect 12y ago
  You guys are both right. The incompatibility b/t PCB design tools and resources is farcical. Unfortunately, software like web frameworks and office productivity gets so many more eyeballs than PCB design software. The market size of PCB design software is small. A single copy of gEDA/Altium/Eagle/Orcad/Kicad can produce a piece of hardware that one billion people use. You could say the same for a single copy of Word, but people own and interact with thousands of different documents, but only a handful to a dozen PCBs and most people are using the same ones (iPhone, laptop motherboard, etc.). As more hobbyists engage at the Arduino level, simple, free tools can open up a bit... but professional stuff will still suffer severe inertial effects - the value of a single PCB design program is simply too huge. I don't see this free(asterisk) offering from Altium as any more than a freemium pattern to divert marketshare from Eagle in particular. I use Eagle, but the EEs at work say Altium is full of bugs. Its 3d board viewer is a gimmick that hooks a lot of people, but it's not as critical as having the proper components. p.s. for simple PCB design, there are numerous free tools: http://www.electroschematics.com/2249/pcb-design-software/ http://www.electroschematics.com/2249/pcb-design-software/ and here's a brief overview of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_EDA_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_EDA_software

sgt 12y ago

Will it be a web-based app or will it be a desktop application? If so, does anyone know if it will run on OS X? A lot of the software tools in electronics and circuit design seem to be Windows centric.

kasbah 12y ago
Dave Jones said on the AmpHour podcast that it will be a Windows program but files have to be stored online. Sounds like a deal breaker really.
- NextPerception 12y ago
  It looks like a stripped down version of their professional Altium design suite which is indeed a Windows program.

illumen 12y ago

How does this compare to Fritzing? http://fritzing.org/home/ http://fritzing.org/home/

andyjohnson0 12y ago
Hard to tell, since CircuitMaker is apparently not available yet. I like Fritzing. I'm just a hobbyist, but having tried other PCB layout tools (Eagle, etc), Fritzing is the only one I've actually been able to be productive with.
- fallingmeat 12y ago
  Tried upverter?
  - andyjohnson0 12y ago
    Looks interesting, and I'll probably give it a try-out. But it seems to store all design data in the "cloud" without the option to export it out, which means I'd be unlikely to use it.
    - zakhomuth 12y ago
      Yes - The default is to stroe your data in the cloud. But you can always download all of your designs in an open well documented json format.
      - lumpypua 12y ago
        Does anything else have the capability to work with the json format? Or what can I convert it into?
        zakhomuth 12y ago
        See here: https://github.com/upverter/schematic-file-converter https://github.com/upverter/schematic-file-converter

userbinator 12y ago

This could be an attempt to capture some percentage of the userbase that would've pirated Altium for personal use/learning, as is common for other large expensive software e.g. Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc.

gioele 12y ago

Slightly offtopic: are there PCB design tools that are _text_ based? I would prefer to _program_ a design, rather than _drawing_ it.

csirac2 12y ago
There's netlist files for schematics, but they're a bit raw to do by hand... Each PCB design package has its own programming language, here's an example of what you can do with Eagle's ULP: http://irq5.io/2013/03/30/circular-layout-ulp-for-eagle/ http://irq5.io/2013/03/30/circular-layout-ulp-for-eagle/ Edit: I suppose you're talking about something more declarative like Eg. povray scripts, I'm not aware of such a thing. Edit2: Eagle's .brd/.sch files are actually XML, FWIW, and from the git diffs I've done from time to time between commits - almost human readable (but perhaps not human writable). Edit3: Agree with jimmyswimmy, there are so many compromises, trade-offs and optimizations going on which (for me at least) require the visual cues when placing parts and routing traces. Sometimes even the 2D visualization on the screen seems inadequate, when you get a board fabbed and see it assembled & fitted, sometimes you have that... oh damn, I wish I had seen it like that, I would have done X.
jimmyswimmy 12y ago
This is hard to understand. A PCB is fundamentally a graphical design. I would think you would need to see it to understand what it's doing. There are no fixed references in a PCB design as there are on a page of paper (which will always have an upper-left corner to reference everything from). On the other hand, the schematic requires no graphical representation and is easily written as a netlist. SPICE works in netlists and most (all?) PCB packages import a netlist. If you wish to represent a schematic as code, that's the way to do it. My initial opinion notwithstanding, if you write a program to let me compile gerbers from code, I'll try my hand at writing a PCB out.
joshvm 12y ago
Then essentially you want to write an autorouter. Modern autorouting is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly stupid. You really need to know exactly when to use it and how to set it up so that it fulfills all your design requirements. Part of the point of PCB design is that it's a _design_ process. You need to make executive decisions about where you can place those components. Things like connectors and interfaces absolutely need to be manually placed (or at least have defined locations). In principle what you're asking is simple - you pass in the netlist and manually place important components and then let the autorouter do the rest. In practice you have to think about: - Grounding schemes - Differential traces - Thermal management - Isolation - Analog/Digital separation - Grounding/stitch vias - Potential room for expansion in the future so board revisions have minimal impact Don't forget that at least some of PCB design is 'artistic'. Your boards should be beautiful!

st3fan 12y ago

This looks cool. But is it Windows-only?

Zuph 12y ago
Per Dave Jones (http://www.eevblog.com/ http://www.eevblog.com/), yes.

NextPerception 12y ago

We use Altium daily at my office and the overwhelming consensus is that we wish they would fix a lot of the bugs in Altium instead of spending time and effort supporting a whole other program. You don't adopt another pet when you have trouble remembering to feed your first pet.

proee 12y ago

We just released a new desktop version of "PCBWeb Designer" http://www.pcbweb.com http://www.pcbweb.com This is a huge improvement of our original tool that relied on silverlight. The project is a WPF application written in c# on .net - so right now it's windows only. We are exploring options to port to other platforms using Xamarin. The tool is 100% free, with no limits on size or parts and includes full gerber output.