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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

#211

Post by AMICABoard »

Okay here is a wish list:

Chip fan out modules. A repo of all popular chips with traces to pins fanned out and variations (Chip XXXX, Fanout A, Fanout B, Fanout C, Compact Fanout D etc) Ideally the fanout modules should have required decoupling caps etc placed compactly).

Accommodate provision for chips such as i.MX 6ULL, the have so many pins that writing connection code would be daunting, maybe have pin groups and groups wired to groups syntax.

Provisions for chips where pins can be configured.

A repo of supporting circuits/modules like clock, clock distribution, PMIC / Power modules etc.

A CPU for example module should come with a list of compatible auxiliary modules such as a suitable PMIC/Power module.

The user will have to wire the relevant pin groups from module to module.

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

#212

Post by ukd1 »

xnzakg wrote: post #96
ukd1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya OpenSCAD is great for in/cross project re-usable components. The only issues I've had is how it outputs circular things for cutting - it does a series of polygons (configurable number), rather than an arc/circular - places like send-cut-send won't accept it, claiming it causes issues with their machines.

Old issue, but annoying nonetheless. Less of a problem when outputting STL files (for printing) which only support polylines and not arcs/circles. Funnily enough, 3D printers nowadays support arcs natively in G-code, so some slicers support detecting rounded polylines and converting them back into circles or arcs. Found a script[0] that does this for DXFs in a github issue[1]. [0]: https://github.com/nophead/Mendel90…

I actually opened that issue - I'm ukd1 on github too. I looked at fixing it at some point, but it tbh didn't seem that easy or like they had time to help, I should probably revisit. The script I couldn't get working right last time I tried, but I should give it a re-look!

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

#213

Post by fxtentacle »

Did you know that the KiCad file format for schematics and PCB layouts is text? And it kind of reads like source code? You can even check it into Git.

What stops electronics from becoming like programming is the routing. It's NP hard and even the big car companies haven't solved it yet, let alone any tool accessible to hobbyists and startups.

So you spend an hour designing the schematics, a few minutes placing the components, and then hours doing the routing by hand. If your product only replaces the first step, that'll save me at most 10% of the work.

If you want to make a crater in this industry, add an autorouter to KiCad and make it sophisticated enough to handle an ESP32 2-layer board without manual assistance. Altium is like $15k per year and cannot do it yet.

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

#214

Post by drunkonvinyl »

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.

this resonates. i will share that i'm trying out and having luck with flux.ai. it's not perfect, but for a small hobby project and someone with little experience and not getting far quickly in kicad, it works. i have a pcb in-hand from jlcpcb right now and it works. it also introduces some of the shared features discussed above. (i don't work for them, just looking for something that would let me do a fairly fast PoC)

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

#215

Post by bboygravity »

napowderly wrote: post #119
addaon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Will it take into account temperature ranges and other parameters as well?

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

#216

Post by fecal_henge »

Hi, EE here, but started my career as unskilled labor in a test lab. This is in contrast to my colleagues who are often physicists.

I love the graphical nature of Schematic design. It helps me visualise problems that my colleagues would admittedly rather code. I take a lot of care in my schematic layout, and it can help me make a good guess as to wether my circuit is planar or not. - usefull when you dont want to incurr the parasitics on a via somewhere.

I would also remark that there is no reason why design reuse would necessitate a text based caprure. We already have reuse though subsheet heirachy, ctrl c/ctrl c and to some degree reference designs.

The only other thing I would add is that a lot of people come from a hobbyist background, which means small volumes. For commercial contract manufacturing, drawing out the same old schematic features for voltage regulators doesnt add up to much NRE as a fraction of the project cost.

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

#217

Post by mawildoer »

robomartin wrote: post #200
Timot05 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this blog post! Super cool to see how things were done early in the industry! Counterintuitively, I do agree with your points. We didn't end up designing the ato language because we actively wanted to end up there but rather because we tried everything else before and none of the solutions we tried worked out. The problem we wanted to solve was: "how does git look like in hardware?". Another way to…

Random thoughts. I have a feeling that very few hardware projects have a bunch of people working on the same schematic. I have personally never experienced that in the context of a team project. What might happens is that each engineer works on a board and the interface between boards is defined by the team. I have done systems with 15 to 20 PCB's interconnected through custom backplanes this way. Modern EDA tools ha…

We hear you! We're most certainly planning on eating up the system's chain to describe, version control and validate up the system's chain.

As one example in an earlier (and likely future) permutation of atopile we could compile harnesses (using the fantastic https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz) by linking two interfaces on connectors.

Long future, if you can integrate mechanically too, you can at least check if not generate the harnesses lengths, bend radii, drip looks etc... for that same harness.

Somewhat like software, you can only tractably do that at scale if the units work and work reliably. Unit tests are the basis of software validation and we expect hardware validation as well. We're starting low-level we know, but with a concepts we know (from the insane scale of big software projects) can work on enormous projects too.

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

#218

Post by fxtentacle »

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.

They did and there's even tools to import their component library into Altium or Eagle.

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

#219

Post by whartung »

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.

I worked on this for a little while myself.

It wasn't so much "pc board by code" so much, but it was more a "pc board by CLI" approach.

And by that what my goal was, was to offer primitives and utility functions that would build the board up over time, but it was to be done incrementally in a Lisp REPL.

My use case scenario, was ancient AutoCAD.

Back in the day, while you could hook up a tablet or other pointing device (I'm talking pre-mouse here) to make AutoCAD drawings, a lot of it was done simply through typing in commands, in AutoLISP.

(lineto 100 100) kind of thing. And the drawing would appear on the screen over time, you'd save the data model, and manipulated with the REPL. If you wanted 10 lines:

    (dotimes (i 10) (let ((x (* i 10)) (y 100)) (line x y x (+ y 100)))
(HN does not have a paren matching editor, apologies...)

Where it broke down for me was coming up with a graphic rendition using CL.

If emacs had anything reasonable regarding graphic support (its SVG support is Not Good), I'd have done it there.

Rethinking it, it just occurred to me I could have probably gone a good way using ABCL in a Java GUI shell.

But the key point is that I think using a REPL for building up something like a circuit can actually work, actually be efficient for users, especially if it's extensible (i.e. (defun grid ...) ). Especially a hybrid (like clicking on a line pastes an identifier into the REPL).

My experiences with KiCAD drove me down that mad hole.

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

#220

Post by mattclarkdotnet »

robomartin wrote: post #200
Timot05 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this blog post! Super cool to see how things were done early in the industry! Counterintuitively, I do agree with your points. We didn't end up designing the ato language because we actively wanted to end up there but rather because we tried everything else before and none of the solutions we tried worked out. The problem we wanted to solve was: "how does git look like in hardware?". Another way to…

Random thoughts. I have a feeling that very few hardware projects have a bunch of people working on the same schematic. I have personally never experienced that in the context of a team project. What might happens is that each engineer works on a board and the interface between boards is defined by the team. I have done systems with 15 to 20 PCB's interconnected through custom backplanes this way. Modern EDA tools ha…

This is all so true! But it also describes the problem very well. Of course a $100k CNC machine design will always be developed by a small team collaborating as you describe. But the tools and processes that work for that most emphatically do not work well for smaller projects with more distributed contributors.

Custom PCBs are so easy to order these days, but they are hellish to design and test well. That would change rapidly if we could reuse basic blocks the same way we do with code

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