I'd like to hear the opinion of Lady Ada on this - one of the industries greatest hardware designers.
Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
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Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#42I think a compiler for PCBs is a great idea!
Are you fully open source today? How has the community aspect been going?
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#43One 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 che…
For sure, its a big benefit of using language, it is comparatively very fast and easy to define custom relationships of component values, trace widths etc that would quickly become untenable in a point and click tool. We think the path forward is to be able to encode the governing equations that you would get in say a buck controllers data sheet directly into our source code. That way from a user perspective you can define your circuit simply by importing modules, defining them (for example input voltage, output voltage and current) we can then solve the component values and pick them from our component database for you. One of our early users wrote a plugin to do LED arrays in an afternoon. Our compiler is all open so its pretty easy to add on custom scripts for whatever you might be wanting to do.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#44Is this related to skidl https://github.com/devbisme/skidl ?
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#45I think a compiler for PCBs is a great idea! Are you fully open source today? How has the community aspect been going?
I bet you do ;) We are fully opensource today, but we will eventually have some features we sell to enterprise. We have a small community of mostly friends at the moment, we are hoping to grow that very soon now that we have something we believe is worth sharing!
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#46One 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 che…
look at OpenSCAD, it's a scripting language to generate models. I used this a lot to generate subpieces and build off of that. easy as saying Bolt("M5", 1.5) or something
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#47I'm curious if you have component checking - does the circuit overload the regulator? am I going to overvolt this capacitor? what is this LED's lifetime? - or if that's somewhere on the roadmap?
I'm also curious if you're able to use an autorouter to minimize board layers. Seems like it should be pretty straightforward to apply some graph theory to this and state the minimal number of layers for a given board, but this also might be NP-hard? I haven't kept up with the theory here.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#48I'd like to hear the opinion of Lady Ada on this - one of the industries greatest hardware designers.
So would we! I think we are trying to do much the same things, make hardware design faster and more accessible.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#49I think a compiler for PCBs is a great idea! Are you fully open source today? How has the community aspect been going?
I bet you do ;) We are fully opensource today, but we will eventually have some features we sell to enterprise. We have a small community of mostly friends at the moment, we are hoping to grow that very soon now that we have something we believe is worth sharing!
I've been doing a lot of selling to enterprise recently - mostly US based. Let me know if I can be of support!
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#50Very neat, nice work.
I tooled around with a similar idea sometime back. There are clear advantages of code over graphical-schematics when it comes to automatic generation of component values / re-use of elements / speed of development / automatic SPICE testing / etc.
The primary issue I ran into was that: electronic circuits are inherently graph-structured and the traditional circuit schematic is well suited, optimal even, for displaying this kind of information. Trying to understand an analog circuit that is described as code seems awkward.