This is really cool, and love that it's open source. Congrats!
Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
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Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
For sure, would be awesome to have a chat some time!
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#73Part of the magic here would be to get your team's hardware engineers to adopt a more software development style workflow.
Indeed, the ability to branch and merge is a pretty exciting concept for me as a hardware designer. Another simple one is building artifacts in CI and doing quality checks, I have make some silly manual errors that have been very expensive during export.
This is very cool and the concept is something I've been wishing on for a while. Unfortunately I work in an enterprise type of design team. I'm a software developer but our hardware team has standardized on Cadence tools and are pretty dug in on how they work, which is kind of opaque to us software guys.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#74One 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
I found OpenSCAD's 3d model representation to be very challenging for anything complicated. I used FreeCAD, which is scriptable, but also uses a brep representation instead of CSG, which IME works a jillion times better.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#75The Net-list stage of abstraction is the easy part, but auto-routing is not. People have tried many times to build a universal router with physics awareness for decades. The issue is in the real world there are countless edge cases where the EE must make a decision on the layout. For low speed digital design... routers have partially worked since the 90's, but for most other things the edge cases make it counter-prod…
Agree, I wish them the best of luck — I’m not convinced a computer will ever beat me in the single-sided perf board niche, and I’m but an amateur, but I’d be happy if one did.
You might be right, dont think we will be tackling perf boards any time soon :D
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#76Very 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, optima…
Yeah we did run into a similar issue. Someone designed a power supply and it wasn't immediately obvious how the elements of the circuit were hooked up in ato.
I think a viewer would be nice ultimately. But we haven't exactly figured out how the solution might look like. ideally something that allows you to create datasheet-like snapshots of part of your design?
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#77LOVE 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…
Forgot to reply to the support aspect:
Best way to support us right now is to try the project and give feedback on where you'd like to see this going. The project is open source so feel free to raise issues or contribute as well :)
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#78I think this is a wonderful idea and begins to create a foundation of data richness and interoperability for a very exciting new approach to PCB design, as I commented elsewhere in this thread However I do want to mention that I think it might be necessary to be able to "cross-compile" to visual schematic format, and back. Or perhaps there is an open schematic tool that can be extended? The issue is that I think elec…
Yeah that’s an interesting aspect. We did implement a viewer very early on. And we then removed it from the project. What we discovered is that: - making a visual viewer is a non trivial endeavor. It takes a lot of time but the value add is marginal for an average viewer. - people tend to spend a lot of time making the viewer look good instead of improving the circuit We think that in the long run, a viewer could be…
Worth adding, we have found much higher returns building tools to solve the problems that a visualizer would normally help you with in other ways. For example ERC checking and modular abstraction of circuits. Working at a 'block diagram' level is much more intuitive than at the net level in my experience.
We also think that there might be better and more interesting ways to view your data, for example maybe you want to just see all the power paths through your circuit, or investigate how a signal travels from your input to your adc through filters, protection etc. Often on big designs these things might be strewn across multiple sheets and a bit hard to follow.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#79I think this is a wonderful idea and begins to create a foundation of data richness and interoperability for a very exciting new approach to PCB design, as I commented elsewhere in this thread However I do want to mention that I think it might be necessary to be able to "cross-compile" to visual schematic format, and back. Or perhaps there is an open schematic tool that can be extended? The issue is that I think elec…
Yeah that’s an interesting aspect. We did implement a viewer very early on. And we then removed it from the project. What we discovered is that: - making a visual viewer is a non trivial endeavor. It takes a lot of time but the value add is marginal for an average viewer. - people tend to spend a lot of time making the viewer look good instead of improving the circuit We think that in the long run, a viewer could be…
As a novice, a viewer would be really helpful to me to understand what it's actually doing. I did bookmark this for the next project I have in mind.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#80This is great! So many ways to improve upon the status quo approaches to circuit design -- notably allowing a single representation to be used for design through spice through layout.