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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

#111

Post by waterheater »

For reference, I've designed ~10 PCBs of varying complexity (simple to highly complex) and done plenty of programming. I've used Eagle, KiCad, and Altium. My comments will try to push you to think about some specific points.

Looking at your demo video, it seems that atopile is less a "tool to build electronic circuit boards with code" and more a tool to perform schematic capture in code. Do you agree with that characterization?

I ask that question because you're clearly relying on the KiCad toolchain for PCB layout, which is a crucial part of the overall PCB design process but is not "PCB design" itself. Right now, KiCad is a tool for PCB design, and you are providing an alternative method of schematic capture. I think you should make sure that the description of your creation accurately reflects its capabilities.

Is anything preventing you from taking output from the existing KiCad schematic representation system and transpiling it into ato? What about transpiling from ato into the KiCad schematic representation system?

Does ato provide any focus on routing? It could be nice to state in software that I want a component or trace constrained to a specific layer on the PCB (or in the PCB, if there's internal layers). I'm assuming no, since ato appears to be purely focused on schematic capture, but I'm curious of your thoughts on this.

It could also be nice to include placement constraints in software. For example, say I have a handful of resistors which I want placed in the same relative area of a board and in an orderly row. Do you provide functionality to allow this? The general aesthetics of PCB layout might be programmatically defined with ato.

Just like Arduino took the nitty-gritty away from microcontroller programming, think about how you can take the nitty-gritty away from schematic capture. One way this could work is with a hierarchical schematic templating system. You'd need to build significant documentation to teach people how to use it, but it could vastly simplify the schematic capture process to a few lines of code by importing a template schematic class and instantiating multiple schematic objects into a project and wiring them together.

It makes sense to me that an "interface" as you define it can be imported for a given project. For example, "Bob's Interface" is the set of a +12V barrel-type power input, a USB-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a 10-pin GPIO header. Any project using "Bob's Interface" has a known set of input and output capabilities. The term "input/output complex" also gets at this idea. Is that how you think of an interface?

That's all for now. :)

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

#112

Post by addaon »

napowderly wrote: post #103
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 opt…

Get even a basic equation solver in there and I'll be a user! Have it handle units properly and I'll be a happy user. Have it be able to handle both worst-case and RSS tolerance stackups and I'll be in love.

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

#113

Post by napowderly »

waterheater wrote: post #111

For reference, I've designed ~10 PCBs of varying complexity (simple to highly complex) and done plenty of programming. I've used Eagle, KiCad, and Altium. My comments will try to push you to think about some specific points. Looking at your demo video, it seems that atopile is less a "tool to build electronic circuit boards with code" and more a tool to perform schematic capture in code. Do you agree with that charac…

We have indeed started with the schematic/requirements half of the problem. My experience in industry is there can be much more direct reuse/configuration in schematic as many boards might have similar features. Layout is typically quite bespoke as it will have mechanical constraints.

That said, we are absolutely looking to take on the layout section in the near future. We are starting with some augmentations of kicad, for example we just released a layout reuse feature, where component layouts can be captured and shared along with the ato code.

I think with few exceptions defining explicit layout choices in our language will be painful and not the right path (perhaps connector positions would be an exception). We have not put a huge amount of energy into this yet, but from some initial playing around, we believe capturing all the information that a person would use to judge a quality layout will be crucial. For example, current tools do not have concepts of current/voltage and definitely not transient behavior.

To get to actually good auto-layout that doesnt suck is going to be a slog for sure.

Thanks!

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

#114

Post by Joker_vD »

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…

> it's just circuits-as-text.

atopile (1) — convert ASCII to pile of electronic components

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

#115

Post by Timot05 »

JRKrause wrote: post #106
Timot05 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, s…

Yeah the side by side thing makes sense. Especially for very low level or analog designs. But in some cases it wouldn't be desirable to show the whole circuit. Say you are dealing with a module that has been characterized and that you know works. In this case, using a language server or a linter that shows you available interfaces might be easier to use.

For the spice graphs, having a jupyter notebook-like interface would be great to document why your design looks the way it does.

If you have specific ideas or drawings of how this might look like, please send them over in our discord server :)

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

#116

Post by napowderly »

Joker_vD wrote: post #114
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…

> it's just circuits-as-text. atopile (1) — convert ASCII to pile of electronic components

love it

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

#117

Post by duskwuff »

alistairjallan wrote: post #109

Absolutely love this, always wondered why there wasn’t a nocode for hardware that outputs a gerber.

> always wondered why there wasn’t a nocode for hardware that outputs a gerber.

Because hardware tends to be informed by messy physical factors which are hard to represent programmatically.

Think along the lines of "the cables are coming from this side of the board", or "buttons need to be reachable by fingers", or "if you're building a weather station, the temperature sensor should be far away from components that generate heat".

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

#118

Post by joemi »

markrages wrote: post #102
andrewstuart wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. She's really great for hobbyists and for prototyping. She's done a ton to help beginners. And Adafruit is a very interesting company. I seriously admire her. But as to the original claim that she's "one of the industries greatest hardware designers", when you look at the electronics industry on a whole (an industry where people design incredibly complex things that are used by millions/billions of people), her _designs_ are nothing special.

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

#119

Post by napowderly »

addaon wrote: post #112
napowderly wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opt…

Get even a basic equation solver in there and I'll be a user! Have it handle units properly and I'll be a happy user. Have it be able to handle both worst-case and RSS tolerance stackups and I'll be in love.

Excited to hear it! Our language already captures tolerances and the solver we are building does proper tolerances stackups. You specify the desired output with a tolerance, eg my_regulator.power_out.voltage = 4.75V to 5.25V and we will solve the stack up to get you there.

Hang tight, its coming soon!

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