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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

#161

Post by brokensegue »

moffkalast wrote: post #126
michaelt wrote: post #6

Very nice! The state of electronics tooling has long been extremely bad - 99% of people who put a regulator into their schematic will want an appropriate input and output capacitor as the datasheet demands. 99% of people who put a microcontroller will want a crystal and a programming port and a reset pin pull-up. It's only because of closed source tools stuck in the stone age that the state of the art is to copy out…

Yeah, trying to learn KiCad is worse than learning Blender. If JLCPcb made a simple online editor that sourced from available parts and integrated directly with their store they'd be running out of banks to put their money into.

I learned kicad fairly quickly. I've tried several times to learn blender and failed. Then again I'm bad at art.

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

#162

Post by fennecbutt »

demondemidi wrote: post #154
jhallenworld wrote: post #134

Why not use Verilog or SystemVerilog? module blinky ( input v3v3, input gnd ); wire led; wire led_r; rp2040 u1 ( .vcc (v3v3), .gnd (gnd), .gpioa15 (led) ); resistor #(.VALUE("220"), .TOLERANCE("5%"), .PART("ERJH2CF1R10X"), .SIZE("1206")) r1 ( .a (led), .b (led_r) ); led #(.PART("WP7113SURDK14V")) d1 ( .anode (v3v3), .cathode (led_r) ); endmodule Use Verilog parameters for all of the part information you might want, l…

I think a lot of young hackers just don't have the breadth of experience to know what has come before them, or what is in common use. OP has reinvented synthesis, but poorly.

And if you want to go there (which you did), older hackers have too much experience and are therefore set in their ways and are incapable of innovation.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

fennecbutt wrote: post #162
demondemidi wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of young hackers just don't have the breadth of experience to know what has come before them, or what is in common use. OP has reinvented synthesis, but poorly.

And if you want to go there (which you did), older hackers have too much experience and are therefore set in their ways and are incapable of innovation.

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by nihzm »

Looks quite neat, but as other have pointed out I do not really see how this is different from traditional HDL languages such as verilog and VHDL. I say this because by looking a bit into atopile examples I only saw easy "digital" circuit stuff with GPIO and resistors, which are all things that can be implemented using FPGAs. However the most difficult things when designing advanced PCBs are EMC / EMI [1] problems with advanced subsystems such as an USB hub or analog filters. BOM generation and modular abstraction are already solved problems in industry (even though I hated every minute of working with Xilix Vivado) and tools like F4PGA [2] are slowling catching up.

If I may add my two cents, I think you should concentrate on making it possible to go beyond lumped element models (which can already be simulated using SPICE, etc) and simple abstraction (solved by VHDL & co) and focus on being able to offer advanced subsystems to less experienced PCB EDA users. Basically, to go for the Altium path, but without Altium. For example, it would be a killer feature if it were possible to import an FTDI USB chip module and a switching power supply module, and obtain a PCB that has a guarantees (up to a degree) that the two will not interfere with each other. Or say, have it automatically optimize a design to guarantee a certain SWR [3].

[1]: https://www.analog.com/media/en/training-seminars/tutorials/...

[2]: https://f4pga.org/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_wave_ratio

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

#166

Post by napowderly »

nihzm wrote: post #165

Looks quite neat, but as other have pointed out I do not really see how this is different from traditional HDL languages such as verilog and VHDL. I say this because by looking a bit into atopile examples I only saw easy "digital" circuit stuff with GPIO and resistors, which are all things that can be implemented using FPGAs. However the most difficult things when designing advanced PCBs are EMC / EMI [1] problems wi…

For sure, our goal is to solve the toughest problems in electrical engineering, we are starting with the low hanging fruit. Confident reuse of designs that can be verified and validated before a chip is placed sounds pretty exciting to me!

BOM generation and abstraction have definitely not made it to PCBA design yet, so that is where we are starting.

Stoked to get to the hard stuff.

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

#167

Post by demondemidi »

fennecbutt wrote: post #162
demondemidi wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of young hackers just don't have the breadth of experience to know what has come before them, or what is in common use. OP has reinvented synthesis, but poorly.

And if you want to go there (which you did), older hackers have too much experience and are therefore set in their ways and are incapable of innovation.

“Go there”? This isn’t a battle. Both can be true. But experience is a fact.

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

#168

Post by techdragon »

Timot05 wrote: post #98
polalavik wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same thing (I'm an EE by day). I think this idea is very cool, but since the dawn of time schematics and PCB layout have always been visual because you are actually building a physical thing. Its easy to see hardware bugs in schematics visually. However, it might be very hard to track it in code, unless the code is one day smart enough to find the bugs for you. You have to hold more context in your…

We do agree. We built an early version of a viewer in the project but later moved away from it because it wasn't good enough to interact with. We might come back to it with something that is more targeted at inspecting only sections of the circuit or provide a block diagram level representation. But we don't think that just outputting a schematic the way they look today is the right solution.

You might find this a stumbling point for adoption. My first thought is this could be a good tool for me to use, but how can I send a design to someone else to get feedback on if I’m not going to expect them to also also learn how to use this or how can I get my design manufactured if the tools can’t export out the, normally very visual, layout files.

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

#169

Post by Timot05 »

echoangle wrote: post #155
Timot05 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aspects of the python lexer and parser implementation were borrowed from python, which is partly why we ended up here. I do agree though.

Python does from x import y though.

Yeah, I think we only allow import x from y for the minute. And because we don't have a language server yet, it wasn't obvious that it was an issue. That'll change soon when the server is up though!
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