Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 300 posts

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#31

Post by Timot05 »

earlyriser wrote: post #27

Hi Tim, I'm just starting with electronics, following the Make Electronics book with my kid. And this seems super useful to understand circuits better (at least for people who code), do you have the plan to make a series of lessons for beginners with the app? Like going from the simple battery-led to complex things? Feel free to email.

Hey!

Really love that. My dad gave me a piece of wood with some basic components like LEDs, motors, resistors and light bulbs and a battery that I could connect those to and understand how they worked. Glad to see you are doing something similar :)

We do have a couple videos and certainly plan to make more: - Get started guide: https://youtu.be/7aeZLlA_VYA - ESP32 module: https://youtu.be/eMWRwZOajdQ - Logic gates kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSeDv3QqRc0

We are also hoping for the package registry to become a place where you can get access to pre-designed modules to put together into a circuit: https://packages.atopile.io

Feel free to reach out per email or discord if you need help setting things up!

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#32

Post by napowderly »

OJFord wrote: post #28

Yes yes yes! I love it when people make the things I think would be a good idea, and then stay on the hobby project idea list for years to come. (I'm struggling to make that not sound sarcastic - maybe it's just my British reading! - but I really am sincere.) When I was thinking about it, a couple of further directions I had in mind were 1) ecosystem/library/sharing of modules, so something like the voltage divider e…

Specifically on the layout section, I have been thinking along the lines of start with sensible 'seed' layouts that users will contribute, then mutate the layouts with a physics driven solver. Imagine links between components as a spring and repulsion forces to model creepage/clearance distances, you could imagine the layout warping into a suitable shape for your board. I am pretty excited to get to this bit.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#33

Post by mawildoer »

OJFord wrote: post #28

Yes yes yes! I love it when people make the things I think would be a good idea, and then stay on the hobby project idea list for years to come. (I'm struggling to make that not sound sarcastic - maybe it's just my British reading! - but I really am sincere.) When I was thinking about it, a couple of further directions I had in mind were 1) ecosystem/library/sharing of modules, so something like the voltage divider e…

Absolutely love to hear that!

100% agreed about the ecosystem too. We've already created a perhaps-too-scrappy package manager, but it works! https://packages.atopile.io/ We're pretty convinced that the awesomeness of the software ecosystem is a function of its openness and open-source and atopile largely came from working out how we could seed a similar shift in the hardware world. I can't wait for the day I can `ato install` SMPS, filters, radios and servo-drives with the confidence they'll just work!

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#34

Post by bb88 »

I think you should do one thing really well, before expanding.

Import from public GitHub libraries could be fun.

Differential pairs.

Impedance controlled traces.

Going further, if I have one supplier's stack up with controlled impedance lines, and I need to switch to a different supplier's stack up, what netclasses would change?

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#36

Post by Timot05 »

bb88 wrote: post #34

I think you should do one thing really well, before expanding. Import from public GitHub libraries could be fun. Differential pairs. Impedance controlled traces. Going further, if I have one supplier's stack up with controlled impedance lines, and I need to switch to a different supplier's stack up, what netclasses would change?

I do agree. The package registry (https://packages.atopile.io) is an attempt at importing from existing GitHub/GitLab ato projects. This will need quite a bit more polish until it gets to the level Rust's crates.io or python's pypi.org

On the language side there are additional features we would like to work on like traits and types (types would include diff pairs and impedance).

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#37

Post by mawildoer »

voctor wrote: post #35

It reminds me of the Akka Graph DSL[1] [1] https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/stream/stream-graphs.h...

Interesting! Haven't come across it before but those linked `~>` operators do indeed quite familiar. If you're familiar with GraphDSL do you have some elements we should look into?

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#39

Post by Timot05 »

syedkarim wrote: post #24

Could you please explain the difference between Atopile and Jitx ( https://www.jitx.com/ )? Both seem to provide software-defined hardware development.

Our language is also a markup language more than a programing language. The goal here is that we would want the code to become a description of what the circuit is, instead of how to obtain it. The obtaining part is the job of the compiler. Not the human.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#40

Post by mlsu »

One thing that surprised me when moving from mechanical CAD to EDA programs is the lack of "relations." I have not used the more professional tools, just KiCad, but it surprised me that there are not more variables, relations, constraints, subassemblies, for things like buck converters and these types of things. KiCad has 'netclasses' which let you set trace widths, but it's all manual, same with the design rules checker. Each vendor seems to have their own design manual for these things, which is nice to have but so tedious -- I have to read a PDF to know what size decoupling cap goes with this IC? Why is that information not encoded in the footprint somehow?

I understand that auto-routing is not a solved problem by any means, but there should be more efficient tools to make it easier. I shudder to imagine laying out some big LED matrix without more advanced tooling.

Post reply on HN