Intro to modern hardware prototyping • Hacker News Board

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#61

Post by evjim » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 11:13 PM 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?

BayAreaCircuits is pretty cheap, in the USA and you can have boards in under a week.

I also like macrofab if you want something assembled.

A few times I have ordered from the board houses on Ebay. Like $20 for 10+ boards and they come in about 2 weeks.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#62

Post by lifekaizen » Sat, Jul 16, 2016, 7:15 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…

True, Altium has done a great job with bringing in the modern features but we weren't comfortable shipping a product with "borrowed" software. We've found some tools that help with the others. For example, SnapEDA has a great component library of footprints and symbols.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#63

Post by lifekaizen » Sat, Jul 16, 2016, 7:16 AM UTC

jpm_sd wrote: post #33

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…

Altium also recently developed a free (!) entry-level version, CircuitMaker ( http://circuitmaker.com/ ).

We looked at CircuitMaker but it appears that you can't have private designs - they are all public. So fine for open source but difficult to use for product dev.

Re: Intro to modern hardware prototyping

#64

Post by drmoh » Sat, Jul 16, 2016, 11:17 PM 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…

Instead of pirating, maybe better to check out some low-cost tools from Altium like CircuitStudio, or even CircuitMaker (which is free). If it's the data sharing and community you're after, check out SnapEDA too, which works with vendors to provide libraries for free to engineers in all major design formats (Altium, EAGLE, KiCad, OrCAD, etc.)