Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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 is a naive port of the pen and paper schematic design process to mouse and keyboard (it's still called "schematic capture" in contrast to "PCB design") but Altium has moved far beyond that, especially with the introduction of cloud features in the last five years (like an online repository for user and vendor created footprints). The field of electrical engineering has been extremely averse to the ideas of open source but for many reasons, Altium's online resources among them, that is finally starting to change. Eagle does have a large community with companies like Sparkfun and Adafruit but those pale in comparison to the community forming around Altium, which is made up of a large number of vendors and professionals who are starting to grasp the benefits of sharing data.

Considering how much the package costs and how much Altium benefits from the growing community, I honestly don't think they'd mind if you pirated the software a few years before you could afford it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

I work at such a place (16.6, to be sure), and agree that it is indeed quite painful.

Fortunately, after almost 2 long years of pushing, a colleague and I finally convinced our branch of its technical merits and justified the business case to switch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com