I'd like to hear the opinion of Lady Ada on this - one of the industries greatest hardware designers.
> one of the industries greatest hardware designers
Is this meant sarcastically?
Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
51–60 of 300 posts
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#52Yes 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.
As someone who just taught themself Kicad to make a simple MIDI controller PCB usi an STM32F4, I was totally blown away, coming from software, how "manual" everything was, how abstruse and arcane.
It's quite difficult as a beginner to know that a design is "correct", or perhaps "correct enough", with respect to component placement and EMI.
It seems like even top EE who specialize in board design utilize rules of thumb rather than rely on simulation.
I was also blown away that the state of the art autorouter for traces seems to be from the early 2000's -- no recent AI magic going on here.
Where is my "autoplacer"? It seems like an AI trained on millions of schematic/pcb combos, even just gerber files via image ingestion, ought to be able to generate a pretty decent layout + routing given constraints.
Or perhaps I'm spoiled coming from software and web because it's so much further removed from physics. But it's still the case that there are a ton of modular components with "API's" that should have a templating language, so very much bravo to this project.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#53This has sooo much promise, I can't describe how excited I am and will definitely be contributing if I can.
This would make it easy to implement a fancy optimizer. Each component tends to have certain acceptable thresholds for their dependencies like input voltages, current limits, external resistor/capacitor/inductor values/ratings, etc.
Then, each component could have different implementations. You can have different manufacturers produce the exact same inductor/capacitor/resistor in different packages. You can link it up to your existing BOM or hook into vendor APIs to get pricing.
Imagine optimizing for cost, removing redundancy, simplifying footprints, and prioritizing in-stock inventory over new order components.
This could be a huge deal, looking forward to its progress
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#54LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT!!!
I'm doing a lot of home automation work, and I absolutely hate that I need to use breadboards, hunt for pre-assembled components, or to spend days designing a PCB for simple things like relay modules with customized IO.
E.g. I have ratgdo for my garage door opener, but its power supply is an ugly buck convertor taped to the box. I'd love to just re-make the ratgdo board, but with a built-in 12V-to-3V buck convertor.
I tried that, but PCB manufacturing with custom component placing requires just too much work.
Is there a way to donate to the project? I'd love to support it.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#55Is this related to skidl https://github.com/devbisme/skidl ?
Hey,
We did use skidl for a little while as we were figuring things out (see a project here: https://gitlab.atopile.io/pew-pew-and-friends/sizzle-sack). But we later ended up moving away from it towards ato for mainly two reasons:
- Baking a description of a circuit into python describes how to obtain the circuit, but doesn't really describe what the circuit is. Skidl projects quickly become hard to read. The user is also not guided towards writing code that compiles since you need to deal with all the complexity of Python as well as the circuit itself. - Contributing to the project and adding features was non trivial
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#56I'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 th…
We have some basic component parameters that we can define, like value, dielectric and voltage rating for capacitors. I think these become much more powerful once we add in equations to help relate these values and link them together. For example if I configure my powersupply for a 12V input, the tool should know that the capacitors need 12V * some safety factor of rating.
I think I see the entry point for auto routing to be taking advantage of the fact that layers have become pretty cheap (atleast for prototyping) and engineering time is the expensive bit. If the tool can help me layout a board in half the time, particularly for test hardware or the likes, that would be huge. Eventually I think we will get to a place where computers will do a better job of layout than most people, but thats a ways off.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#57This is a great start, well done!
Eventually it would be amazing to import (for example) a buck converter circuit with a wide voltage input, fixed output suitable for RF, and have it automatically check available components at JLCPCB and then lay it all out with, adhering to best practices (ground planes & capacitors right next to pins etc.) If the available components change, it can tweak the footprints and layout without having to start from scratch.
Good luck, I’ll be following closely!
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#58Reminds me of openscad - https://openscad.org/ but for circuits instead of shapes. Turning complex wysiwyg editor operations into reusable code is such an improvement, especially with the advent of usable LLMs to help with boilerplate.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#59This is a great start, well done! Eventually it would be amazing to import (for example) a buck converter circuit with a wide voltage input, fixed output suitable for RF, and have it automatically check available components at JLCPCB and then lay it all out with, adhering to best practices (ground planes & capacitors right next to pins etc.) If the available components change, it can tweak the footprints and layout w…
For sure the goal! Our current component tool will find components that are available on JLC, in stock and to your spec, no more looking for resistor part numbers. The layout side is going to be exciting, we are just scratching the surface there.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#60LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT!!! I'm doing a lot of home automation work, and I absolutely hate that I need to use breadboards, hunt for pre-assembled components, or to spend days designing a PCB for simple things like relay modules with customized IO. E.g. I have ratgdo for my garage door opener, but its power supply is an ugly buck convertor taped to the box. I'd love to just re-make the ratgdo board, but with a built-in…
That’s exactly what we are going for!
Have a look at packages.atopile.io. We have a package with power supplies that you can just add to your board with
ato install regulators