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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

#101

Post by xnzakg »

napowderly wrote: post #4
Liftyee wrote: post #2

Looks really useful! As a hardware designer I've had plenty of copy pasting bits of schematics to duplicate common functionality. Seems like this could be really helpful in preventing mistakes and increasing quality once used to it. Have you got any plans for defined interfaces/modularity so devices using SPI, I²C, etc. can be chained together without manually defining pin connections? Also, will there be support for…

We do have interfaces! They are super useful, I am very stoked that I dont have to remember which way around MISO/MOSI go any more. Interfaces are just a collection of signals eg interface I2C: signal sda signal scl signal gnd you can connect two together like so: micro.i2c ~ sensor.i2c Importing schematics would be possible, but IMO not super valuable as all we could import would be the raw connectivity, a big benef…

How does this handle connecting two microcontrollers with one being a SPI master and one being a slave? Or connecting UART between two devices?

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

#102

Post by markrages »

andrewstuart wrote: post #93
markrages wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "industry" you mean "electronics hobbyists"?

I oh see you are wanting to diminish her capabilities for some reason. I'm not interested buddy, you can take your sneering elsewhere until you show me the multi million dollar company you have created, the hundreds of commercial quality boards you have designed and sold for real money, the driver software you wrote to make them usable and the industry accolades you have received - on merit.

She's a solid entrepreneur and a competent engineer.

Calling her "greatest" seems odd, for implementing breakout boards with datasheet circuits.

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

#103

Post by napowderly »

addaon wrote: post #99

Unless I'm missing something, this is not circuits-as-code, it's just circuits-as-text. It's basically a non-standard way to represent a netlist, and to hang metadata off that netlist -- which is, to be fair, quite cool and useful. But take the example from [0] of a voltage divider. I agree that that is a textual description of a voltage divider that can be compiled to a netlist, a BOM, etc. But what is the actual di…

For sure, we found that to start with something useful from day 0 we needed to be able to completely represent any possible circuit. Starting by just providing a cleaner way to write out a netlist is just the beginning.

We are working to add an equations solver to our compiler over the next few weeks, which will allow you to do things like set the ratio of a divider and total resistance, then have the solver pick optimal values based on availability, cost etc.

I think that gets really exciting when you start to be able to link these together, its trivial from there to directly set the output voltage of a power supply in volts, which will internally configure the feedback resistor divider.

Also verified designs will be super important. Its a little crazy that the status quo is you will almost inevitably make a silly mistake on your first spin. I am imagining designers will go off, make a new circuit, build and test it then make a PR to merge it into main.

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

#104

Post by Timot05 »

addaon wrote: post #99

Unless I'm missing something, this is not circuits-as-code, it's just circuits-as-text. It's basically a non-standard way to represent a netlist, and to hang metadata off that netlist -- which is, to be fair, quite cool and useful. But take the example from [0] of a voltage divider. I agree that that is a textual description of a voltage divider that can be compiled to a netlist, a BOM, etc. But what is the actual di…

Had a play here for equations: https://github.com/atopile/atopile/blob/tim/equations/sandbo...

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

#105

Post by napowderly »

xnzakg wrote: post #101
napowderly wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have interfaces! They are super useful, I am very stoked that I dont have to remember which way around MISO/MOSI go any more. Interfaces are just a collection of signals eg interface I2C: signal sda signal scl signal gnd you can connect two together like so: micro.i2c ~ sensor.i2c Importing schematics would be possible, but IMO not super valuable as all we could import would be the raw connectivity, a big benef…

How does this handle connecting two microcontrollers with one being a SPI master and one being a slave? Or connecting UART between two devices?

Today, poorly. We just do a dumb matching of signal names. I imagine we will do something like add a property to the interfaces on each device.

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

#106

Post by JRKrause »

Timot05 wrote: post #76
JRKrause wrote: post #50

Very 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?

A nebulous description of my ideal setup would be something like this:

Side-by-side schematic symbol view / code view that are actively synced to one-another in real-time. Schematic view allows basic arranging of parts, editing interconnects, triggering jump-to-reference within the code view, adding probe points for SPICE, displaying SPICE output graphs. Code side does all the heavy lifting like creating new parts, scripted behaviors, editing component values, all the cool shit that would be a nightmare to sort into a GUI.

Much easier said than done, of course.

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

#107

Post by napowderly »

dartos wrote: post #20
napowderly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed a huge improvement in ChatGPTs coding abilities having an interpreter to check its work. I expect we will be able to bring a similar feedback loop to hardware once we can integrate things like simulation and equations. Also having modules that are tricky to configure incorrectly.

I’ve noticed the opposite with chatgpt. To be fair, idk how much elixir code is in the training set.

yeah I have only really used it for simple python things, its pretty good at that.

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

#108

Post by nerpderp82 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #46
mlsu wrote: post #40

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 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

As a regular OpenSCAD user, I wouldn't bring it up as a good solution for anything. It exists, you can solve problems with it, but it isn't a good design. It should just be a library in a real language.
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