Intro to modern hardware prototyping • Hacker News Board

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#41

Post by desdiv » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 2:31 AM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #30

krapht wrote: post #4

Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you're going cheap, I'd stick with KiCAD. It's unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I've also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it. If you have any academic links at all though, or don't mind piracy, I'd grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling.…

I'm very much against software piracy but if you're starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software…

>it's still called "schematic capture" in contrast to "PCB design"

So what is it called when I capture a schematic in order to do some SPICE simulations on it? "PCB design minus the designing PCB part"?

"Capture" in this context means "the act of putting information in a form that a computer can use or read"¹, so I don't see how the phrase "schematic capture" is archaic when it mentions computers in its definition.

¹http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capture

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#42

Post by archimedespi » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 2:42 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #18

krapht wrote: post #4

Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you're going cheap, I'd stick with KiCAD. It's unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I've also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it. If you have any academic links at all though, or don't mind piracy, I'd grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling.…

Holy shit, that JLink is expensive. What does it get me more than the JTAG FTDI OpenOCD GDB setup that I have currently, who's boards cost my ~$100 in super low volume?

Just grab a cheap Chinese clone off of Ebay. They're pretty much completely functionally identical in my experience.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#43

Post by skaevola » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 3:12 AM UTC

Xunxi wrote: post #38

krapht wrote: post #4

Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you're going cheap, I'd stick with KiCAD. It's unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I've also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it. If you have any academic links at all though, or don't mind piracy, I'd grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling.…

What are some of the reputable "small board-houses"? Any recommendations?

OSH Park is very cheap and good for bare boards: https://oshpark.com/

If you want somebody to populate the boards for you, I love Macrofab: https://macrofab.com/

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#44

Post by elijahparker » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 3:14 AM UTC

Xunxi wrote: post #38

krapht wrote: post #4

Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you're going cheap, I'd stick with KiCAD. It's unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I've also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it. If you have any academic links at all though, or don't mind piracy, I'd grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling.…

What are some of the reputable "small board-houses"? Any recommendations?

For simpler prototype boards I use oshpark.com, but a big downside is no electrical testing. For more important/complex stuff, I've been very happy with jetpcb.com in Taiwan. Full e-test and I get the boards in about 5 days

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#45

Post by pmorici » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 3:55 AM UTC

skaevola wrote: post #43

Xunxi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of the reputable "small board-houses"? Any recommendations?

OSH Park is very cheap and good for bare boards: https://oshpark.com/ If you want somebody to populate the boards for you, I love Macrofab: https://macrofab.com/

First I've heard of Macrofab, have you ever tried circuithub? I've been using the latter and wonder how they compared.

Edit: just checked out Macrofab and they seem to be more expensive than circuithub at least for the couple example projects I threw into the quoting engine.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#46

Post by ploxiln » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:04 AM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #30

krapht wrote: post #4

Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you're going cheap, I'd stick with KiCAD. It's unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I've also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it. If you have any academic links at all though, or don't mind piracy, I'd grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling.…

I'm very much against software piracy but if you're starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software…

I used Cadence a fair bit, back in university (CMU) about 8 years ago - it is really surprisingly poorly made and maintained software.

Very powerful, huge number of features. Crashed if you looked at it funny. Some windows made with TK, some with Athena widgets, some with GTK1, some with straight X11. Can't copy and paste between most of them.

I'm glad to hear it's not really the industry standard I had the impression it was. I had the impression that most purely-hardware-focused engineers didn't care about software quality much and so the whole industry just naturally leaned that way.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#47

Post by gricardo99 » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:15 AM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #46

akiselev wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much against software piracy but if you're starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software…

I used Cadence a fair bit, back in university (CMU) about 8 years ago - it is really surprisingly poorly made and maintained software. Very powerful, huge number of features. Crashed if you looked at it funny. Some windows made with TK, some with Athena widgets, some with GTK1, some with straight X11. Can't copy and paste between most of them. I'm glad to hear it's not really the industry standard I had the impressio…

haha, you almost exactly described the Cadence HDL simulation suite, used for HDL simulation in ASIC/FPGA design. But... it is widely used in industry. Their tools are so buggy, and poorly made.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#48

Post by akiselev » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:17 AM UTC

desdiv wrote: post #41

akiselev wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much against software piracy but if you're starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software…

>it's still called "schematic capture" in contrast to "PCB design" So what is it called when I capture a schematic in order to do some SPICE simulations on it? "PCB design minus the designing PCB part"? "Capture" in this context means "the act of putting information in a form that a computer can use or read"¹, so I don't see how the phrase "schematic capture" is archaic when it mentions computers in its definition. ¹…

Are you arguing that a term can't be archaic because its definition has the word "computer" in it? That's silly.

The term capture comes from a time when ECAD programs were unwieldy and difficult to use (we're talking 60s and 70s) and components weren't as complex so engineers first designed the schematic using pencil and paper and only then "captured" it in a digital format using an ECAD program. We design circuits and yet still capture schematics because of the usability of half century old software.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#49

Post by akiselev » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:28 AM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #46

akiselev wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much against software piracy but if you're starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software…

I used Cadence a fair bit, back in university (CMU) about 8 years ago - it is really surprisingly poorly made and maintained software. Very powerful, huge number of features. Crashed if you looked at it funny. Some windows made with TK, some with Athena widgets, some with GTK1, some with straight X11. Can't copy and paste between most of them. I'm glad to hear it's not really the industry standard I had the impressio…

The thing with hardware is that once you've designed the PCB and it works to the spec, you don't need to do anything until some part you need goes out of production. This means that the major ECAD money comes from shops that do a lot of one off projects which means that aerospace and defense are king. Since those industries are risk averse and spend much more time in manufacturing and testing than in design, they never really had much care for the quality of design software, even when it costs an arm and a leg like Cadence. Since these industries have extensive quality control and review processes, a bug or a crash would only cost a little bit of time. Remember though that Orcad was first developed in the mid-eighties so with the risk averse clients it's no wonder it hasn't aged well.

But yes, rest assured, outside of some (rather large) niches, no one really tolerates the garbage that is the old ECAD packages.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#50

Post by mng2 » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:56 AM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #30

krapht wrote: post #4

Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you're going cheap, I'd stick with KiCAD. It's unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I've also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it. If you have any academic links at all though, or don't mind piracy, I'd grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling.…

I'm very much against software piracy but if you're starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software…

On the other hand, if you get accustomed to using better software, and end up working at a place that uses, say, Orcad 16.2, it will be much more painful of an experience.