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Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

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

#81

Post by mawildoer »

mikeortman wrote: post #53

This 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 differe…

That's awesome! We're definitely thinking along the same lines in terms of a lot of those optimisations / cost-functions.

Here's some of the basics Tim was playing with earlier: https://github.com/atopile/atopile/blob/d25686952534e0f96582...

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

#82

Post by markrages »

andrewstuart wrote: post #67
markrages wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the industries greatest hardware designers Is this meant sarcastically?

>>Is this meant sarcastically? No I don't mean it sarcastically, why do you ask? Do you not see Lady Ada as a shining light of the industry? Lady Ada is one of the industry's greatest hardware designers and I would value her opinion on this. If you don't know who she is, her name is Limor Fried and she founded AdaFruit. I don't have current stats but from 2016: Revenue US$45 million (2016)[1] Number of employees 105…

By "industry" you mean "electronics hobbyists"?

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

#83

Post by Timot05 »

chrsw wrote: post #73
napowderly wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The core compiler is open source so hopefully the stakes are low to start using it on non-production equipment like test fixtures, bed of nails, quick prototypes... Based on experience using the compiler on those project, it could be transitioned to higher stakes designs.

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

#84

Post by napowderly »

chrsw wrote: post #73
napowderly wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was a designer at a big company in my last job. Many of my colleagues shared the sentiment that the tools were trash, I think people just need an exciting future to rally around. I think being able to link across disciplines is super exciting also, firmware and hardware can be versioned along side eachother, no more checking schematics for pinouts and meetings about which pin which signal should be on, just put up a PR, have both hardware and FW teams review.

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

#85

Post by Timot05 »

resters wrote: post #80

This 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.

Yeah, that would be great. We currently don't compile down to spice but we hope to get there one day.

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

#86

Post by napowderly »

resters wrote: post #80

This 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.

For sure, its amazing how many places you need to write down basically the same information today. EDA tool, SPICE, requirements pages, documentation. SPICE is definitely an exciting one, particularly as the model can be versioned along with the package with parametrized tests that will automatically run in CI.

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

#87

Post by napowderly »

malfist wrote: post #79
Timot05 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am definitely curious for feedback from people after using it for a while. I felt the same in the beginning, but after writing a fair bit of it, I rarely find myself wanting it. I could imagine for more casual or new users it could be helpful at least for the transition.

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

#88

Post by Timot05 »

cupcakecommons wrote: post #58

Reminds 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.

I do agree. Though it is interesting to try figure out why openscad (and similar projects) haven't become more prominent in the industry. It feels like some aspects about code to hardware have to be tweaked for it to become the standard way to design.
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