This is really cool, and love that it's open source. Congrats!
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Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
91–100 of 300 posts
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#92I think this is a wonderful idea and begins to create a foundation of data richness and interoperability for a very exciting new approach to PCB design, as I commented elsewhere in this thread However I do want to mention that I think it might be necessary to be able to "cross-compile" to visual schematic format, and back. Or perhaps there is an open schematic tool that can be extended? The issue is that I think elec…
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 head that you cant export to your visual senses when its written as code. You cant see the actual circuit flow.
edit: just wanted to double down on this being very cool though. i dont mean to deflate this project and I'm about to design a pcb for a personal project - I might give this a go for fun. the promise is there and asthe project and feature set grows i can see it being the way forward.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Is this meant sarcastically? No I don't mean it sarcastically, why do you ask? Do you not see Lady Ada as a shining light of the industry? Lady Ada is one of the industry's greatest hardware designers and I would value her opinion on this. If you don't know who she is, her name is Limor Fried and she founded AdaFruit. I don't have current stats but from 2016: Revenue US$45 million (2016)[1] Number of employees 105…
By "industry" you mean "electronics hobbyists"?
I oh see you are wanting to diminish her capabilities for some reason.
I'm not interested buddy, you can take your sneering elsewhere until you show me the multi million dollar company you have created, the hundreds of commercial quality boards you have designed and sold for real money, the driver software you wrote to make them usable and the industry accolades you have received - on merit.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Is this meant sarcastically? No I don't mean it sarcastically, why do you ask? Do you not see Lady Ada as a shining light of the industry? Lady Ada is one of the industry's greatest hardware designers and I would value her opinion on this. If you don't know who she is, her name is Limor Fried and she founded AdaFruit. I don't have current stats but from 2016: Revenue US$45 million (2016)[1] Number of employees 105…
By "industry" you mean "electronics hobbyists"?
Adafruit breakouts, libraries, and other various components are often leveraged at early prototype stages in general industry.
That is unless all you do is high speed FPGA work and that's all you consider to be "industry".
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#95I think this will be well received in the personal keyboards community (I will like to see how to design the PBC for custom keyb!)
Oh yeah we did think about that. Would be cool to have an ato package for a keyboard! Or maybe a script that generates both the CAD (with OpenSCAD or similar) and the ato code would ne nice.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
look at OpenSCAD, it's a scripting language to generate models. I used this a lot to generate subpieces and build off of that. easy as saying Bolt("M5", 1.5) or something
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/blob/master/dxf.py [1]: https://github.com/openscad/openscad/issues/4605
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#97This is great! So many ways to improve upon the status quo approaches to circuit design -- notably allowing a single representation to be used for design through spice through layout.
For sure, its amazing how many places you need to write down basically the same information today. EDA tool, SPICE, requirements pages, documentation. SPICE is definitely an exciting one, particularly as the model can be versioned along with the package with parametrized tests that will automatically run in CI.
Exactly. A new level of modularity will be possible. Pretty incredible! Also parametric designs of modules (a function call with 3.3v vs 5v, or 8bit vs 12bit ADC) all the way down.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#98I think this is a wonderful idea and begins to create a foundation of data richness and interoperability for a very exciting new approach to PCB design, as I commented elsewhere in this thread However I do want to mention that I think it might be necessary to be able to "cross-compile" to visual schematic format, and back. Or perhaps there is an open schematic tool that can be extended? The issue is that I think elec…
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.
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#99Unless I'm missing something, this is not circuits-as-code, it's just circuits-as-text. It's basically a non-standard way to represent a netlist, and to hang metadata off that netlist -- which is, to be fair, quite cool and useful.
But take the example from [0] of a voltage divider. I agree that that is a textual description of a voltage divider that can be compiled to a netlist, a BOM, etc. But what is the actual division properties? What's the combined tolerance stackup? What I /want/ to be able to do is define a module generator function that takes a ratio, a desired output tolerance, and a maximum output current and generates the divider module with resistors chosen (both resistance and tolerance) that will meet those properties. And while I'm wishing, given that (for low output currents) this is an underdefined problem, I'd also like a way to lean towards components already in the BOM, either by just manually using preferred values (yuck), or by outputting multiple possibilities and having a selector downstream that does BOM line count optimization.
Besides taking much, much more of the drudge work out of this, it also makes these circuit-as-code text files reviewable, in much the same way code is. Consider an input pin for an ADC on a microcontroller. On the signal path, I might have at a minimum a voltage divider to get things in range, a low pass filter to get rid of aliasing, and a buffer to satisfy the input pin impedance requirements. If this is three different modules, each with two or five components... reviewing this is equivalent to designing it, I need to check each bit. If, instead, this is generate_divider(1/3, 0.1%); generate_lowpass(200 Hz); module my_standard_opamp_bufer -- then I only need to review those implementations once, and can trust the use of them (for, potentially, dozens of ADC pins).
Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
#100I think this is a wonderful idea and begins to create a foundation of data richness and interoperability for a very exciting new approach to PCB design, as I commented elsewhere in this thread However I do want to mention that I think it might be necessary to be able to "cross-compile" to visual schematic format, and back. Or perhaps there is an open schematic tool that can be extended? The issue is that I think elec…
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…
I have found taking a 'functional programming' like approach, where you build up your circuit from small blocks with specific functions that are easy to hold in your mind and then building up by combining those. For example instead of sticking a bunch of resistors and caps in your top level file, you can abstract them into their functions like a filter, resistor divider etc. Very curious to get your thoughts on using the tool!