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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

#291

Post by Mikhail_K »

anamax wrote: post #287
Mikhail_K wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deeply flawed? Not really. Python's performance problems are unfixable without wholesale redesign of the language and standard library. Its package management is a bad joke. The developers give no indication that they have any intention to fix those problems, rather than keep stuffing more unnecessary and badly thought-out features into it. Obsolescence should be gauged by how modern the design of a language is, ra…

> Python's performance problems are unfixable Python's performance, aka runtime, is irrelevant for this application. Getting things done is a much better goal that being modern. Python is very good for getting things done for a wide range of applications.

> Python's performance, aka runtime, is irrelevant for this application.

While you are doing toy schematics, maybe.

> Getting things done is a much better goal that being modern.

If you don't care when this "getting things done" creates unmaintainable mess, perhaps.

Using python as platform for language design shows that the authors of "Autopile" are uninformed.

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

#292

Post by lelanthran »

napowderly wrote: post #282
rowanG077 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. By FAR the most annoying thing of creating a simple PCB is dealing with symbols and footprints. Why the hell is this is not a solved problem.

In our tool, just give it a part number and it will find and download the footprint and create an ato file for the component. We currently support components on JLC, but eventually plan to build out a pretty substantial library. We will also capture a good fraction of information that you would currently need to go to the datasheet for.

I wanted to give your tool a good look before I responded, hence why I am responding so late.

Anyway, my 2c worth:

1.

> In our tool, just give it a part number and it will find and download the footprint and create an ato file for the component.

I don't think this is scalable (although, for my use, probably sufficient). There are just too many parts that are in existence, and the rate of new part creation is probably higher per day than your staff and/or community can handle.

It's fixable if you have plugins for each EDA tool's format (KiCad, Eagle, etc).

2. I'm very surprised at the language used - it's very unlike what is normally used (s-expressions) in EDA. Lisp-like languages tend to be highly used in CAD applications, so it would clear a lot up if you were to explain what the advantages ato are over a minimal Lisp-like language.

3. The dependency list (in terms of knowledge required) is a dealbreaker for me[1]. I need to know how to manage Python environments, the ato language and YAML?

Since all of the constructs in all of those languages are a subset of (or can be represented by) s-expressions, perhaps it would have been best if you switched to s-expressions only. Then a) there's only one language to learn, b) that language is already syntax-highlighted and c) it's flexible enough for any future features you want to add in (rules definition, rules-checkers, etc).

From what I can see here and now, the ato language would have to see significant changes if it needs to be used for some serious stuff.

Sorry for the negativity, but I wish you all the luck nevertheless.

[1] I looked for a download link, couldn't find one, read a few of the installation instructions, then gave up.

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

#293

Post by napowderly »

lelanthran wrote: post #292
napowderly wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our tool, just give it a part number and it will find and download the footprint and create an ato file for the component. We currently support components on JLC, but eventually plan to build out a pretty substantial library. We will also capture a good fraction of information that you would currently need to go to the datasheet for.

I wanted to give your tool a good look before I responded, hence why I am responding so late. Anyway, my 2c worth: 1. > In our tool, just give it a part number and it will find and download the footprint and create an ato file for the component. I don't think this is scalable (although, for my use, probably sufficient). There are just too many parts that are in existence, and the rate of new part creation is probably…

For sure, the way I see the component library is ability to capture progress. In the current paradigm how many times have schematics, symbols and footprints been drawn up for common ICs/circuits? I would expect 100s or in some cases many thousands of times. Our hope is by providing an open source and shareable format we can reduce this. If people really hate code and want to write a tool to convert to altium/kicad/cadence format, go for it! At the same time, I think the way we share component data is pretty dated, PDF datasheets do not adequately capture component information in a way that can be apples to apples compared in any automated fashion, best we have is something like a digikey search. In the future I would like to be able to have much more sophisticated requirements that automated search tools can use to help me find the best components for my use.

Not personally a fan of the readability of lisp, but that is just a personal preference. Our assumption is that python is going to be the most familiar language to our users and following a python like syntax will make picking it up easy. Our language is definately still quite immature and we are still figuring out exactly what it should look like.

There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve at the moment, we do have some getting started videos that walk you through the whole process. If there is anything missing or confusing, please point it out! We do want to make it as approachable as possible. It will only get better from here, I promise!

On the downloading, currently we have the package on pypi, which does make it pretty easy to install from a command line, but I can appreciate that will be new to alot of people. In the future we might do an executable download version.

We have a getting started video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aeZLlA_VYA

We are very active on discord also if you get stuck or have any questions/feedback, hope to see you there! https://discord.gg/PBq4pS4K3p

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

#294

Post by joemi »

leptons wrote: post #290
joemi wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I noted "Buying lots of things in order to resell them is more complicated than buying just one or two things for yourself". Both of the links you provided to cheaper sellers are not set up for bulk sales. The one on Amazon has a link for buying in bulk, but that only goes up to 999, and if you put 999 in for the quantity in their bulk page, it won't let you because they only have less than 100 pcs available. And…

Nice goalpost move. >I'm fairly confident that if you looked and found a bulk wholesaler for this item that offers terms, the per unit cost is going to be closer to the Adafruit price than to the Aliexpress price you quoted. Confidently incorrect. We're talking about Adafruit gouging hobbyists . Not wholesale bulk purchasing. For the average person buying a few or a dozen rolls of LEDs, Adafruit is the worst possible…

I'm not moving goalposts. For this entire time I've been trying to explain why a situation can arise like this one where Adafruit, a US company, ends up selling something for more money than some no-name Chinese sellers, and that it's not price gouging just because they're selling it for more money.

The only explanation I can think of for your strong opposition to what I'm explaining is that I think you might be working with a different definition of "price gouging" than is commonly accepted. Price gouging is when a seller raises prices unnecessarily due to an increase in demand or a decrease in supply (like when some places raised the price of toilet paper early during the covid pandemic). I've repeatedly tried explaining why that is not what's happening in Adafruit's case -- Adafruit's prices are a result of the fact that they're a very different business than no-name Chinese sellers on Aliexpress and the costs that they're getting goods for can be higher due to their needs (this is why I was talking about the wholesalers that Adafruit deals with). It's perfectly rational and not "mental gymnastics" -- this is common business. This is also why most stores that are not national chains have higher prices than national chains (and Amazon, for that matter, though that's messier since they also have third party sellers). Again, this isn't price gouging -- they just can't get the goods they sell for as cheap prices as national chains.

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

#295

Post by leptons »

joemi wrote: post #294
leptons wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice goalpost move. >I'm fairly confident that if you looked and found a bulk wholesaler for this item that offers terms, the per unit cost is going to be closer to the Adafruit price than to the Aliexpress price you quoted. Confidently incorrect. We're talking about Adafruit gouging hobbyists . Not wholesale bulk purchasing. For the average person buying a few or a dozen rolls of LEDs, Adafruit is the worst possible…

I'm not moving goalposts. For this entire time I've been trying to explain why a situation can arise like this one where Adafruit, a US company, ends up selling something for more money than some no-name Chinese sellers, and that it's not price gouging just because they're selling it for more money. The only explanation I can think of for your strong opposition to what I'm explaining is that I think you might be work…

>and that it's not price gouging just because they're selling it for more money.

We're not talking a few cents or dollars more. We're talking about more than 5x more the price of what they actually should cost.

You can call it whatever you want, but Adafruit prices are ridiculous. I gave one example of many. Go ahead and throw your money away if you really want to, I don't care.

You absolutely are doing mental gymnastics to try to justify 5x price difference, when they get the LEDs from China. It's the same stuff.

Nothing you can do can explain this, so just give up. I'm done with this, you're wasting my time with your tl;dr;s

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

#296

Post by outlog »

> What would you want us to build?

A simple BUY button - take away all the mess for me as "end-user" who just want a board (I don't want to spend hours of BOM files, jlpcb, soldout parts etc.) - take away the mess for the creator of building a community around a design, monetize it, etc etc.

diyBMS recently did a short video on setting up shop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkg1Fu41QHE

(also group buying would mean huge savings as pooled productions would yield big production runs.. etc.)

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

#297

Post by drunkonvinyl »

moffkalast wrote: post #258
drunkonvinyl wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh now this one is interesting, I've given it a short try and the UX is just on another level compared to the usual, I might actually be able to get something done with it. This is what EasyEDA should've been, not the terrible KiCad web clone that it is. For us hobbyists there's no point in investing years learning something proper like Altium because we won't ever be shipping to production or doing stupidly complex…

i've even figured out how to create a component that didn't exist in their library - a lot of the manufacturers/related appear to provide the symbol, footprint and 3d files to recreate it on flux. this is one for example - https://www.flux.ai/centplaids0u/oki-78sr-51p5-w36-c-1480 - a 12v to 5v voltage regulator. got files from here: https://www.snapeda.com/parts/OKI-78SR-5/1.5-W36-C/Murata%20.... Got it built into the board and it works! holy heck.

hope it works for you!

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

#298

Post by anamax »

Mikhail_K wrote: post #291
anamax wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python's performance problems are unfixable Python's performance, aka runtime, is irrelevant for this application. Getting things done is a much better goal that being modern. Python is very good for getting things done for a wide range of applications.

> Python's performance, aka runtime, is irrelevant for this application. While you are doing toy schematics, maybe. > Getting things done is a much better goal that being modern. If you don't care when this "getting things done" creates unmaintainable mess, perhaps. Using python as platform for language design shows that the authors of "Autopile" are uninformed.

> While you are doing toy schematics, maybe.

How many boards have more than 100k elements? (I'm reasonably certain that they can handle more, but ....)

Your assumption that Python necessarily results in an "unmaintainable mess" is "interesting," that is, wrong. More to the point, unmaintainable messes can be written in any language, no matter how "modern."

Not only that, but it's irrelevant. When I was a young engineer, I pointed out that a given system wasn't scalable. The person in charge of the project said "Yes, but by the time that scalability matters, I won't even be managing the person whose problem that is."

As to whether their choice of Python is fatal, feel free to do it better in a "modern language."

If you're right, you'll do well and good. If you're wrong...

What? You're not going to step into the ring?

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

#299

Post by rowanG077 »

napowderly wrote: post #293
lelanthran wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to give your tool a good look before I responded, hence why I am responding so late. Anyway, my 2c worth: 1. > In our tool, just give it a part number and it will find and download the footprint and create an ato file for the component. I don't think this is scalable (although, for my use, probably sufficient). There are just too many parts that are in existence, and the rate of new part creation is probably…

For sure, the way I see the component library is ability to capture progress. In the current paradigm how many times have schematics, symbols and footprints been drawn up for common ICs/circuits? I would expect 100s or in some cases many thousands of times. Our hope is by providing an open source and shareable format we can reduce this. If people really hate code and want to write a tool to convert to altium/kicad/ca…

For what it's worth I'm very happy you didn't go with lisp. I abhor s-expressions and think it shouldn't be used for anything except machine reading.

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

#300

Post by Mikhail_K »

anamax wrote: post #298
Mikhail_K wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python's performance, aka runtime, is irrelevant for this application. While you are doing toy schematics, maybe. > Getting things done is a much better goal that being modern. If you don't care when this "getting things done" creates unmaintainable mess, perhaps. Using python as platform for language design shows that the authors of "Autopile" are uninformed.

> While you are doing toy schematics, maybe. How many boards have more than 100k elements? (I'm reasonably certain that they can handle more, but ....) Your assumption that Python necessarily results in an "unmaintainable mess" is "interesting," that is, wrong. More to the point, unmaintainable messes can be written in any language, no matter how "modern." Not only that, but it's irrelevant. When I was a young engine…

> I'm reasonably certain that they can handle more

"reasonably" is out of place here.

> our assumption that Python necessarily results in an "unmaintainable mess" is "interesting," that is, wrong.

It's not assumption, it's a conclusion based on the state of Python's "ecosystem"

> As to whether their choice of Python is fatal, feel free to do it better in a "modern language."

Yeah, the only people who can judge food are cooks themselves.

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