It looks like a mistake to target KiCad. Pros generally use Altium.
2 layers is super limiting!
24 hour turnaround is actually quite slow... I would bet they have a human in the loop.
2 layers is super limiting!
24 hour turnaround is actually quite slow... I would bet they have a human in the loop.
24 hours, however, is a little bit long.
It would be nice to see exactly what they are offering before uploading a file, right on the front page. Some components absolutely need to be in a fixed position, some can be moved around... Some have RF requirements... Does it minimize size? Does it brute-force the traces?
Me too. Altium is a reasonably good tool, but I would be super happy if its monopoly on professional electronics design would be broken.
It takes dsn input files and outputs ses files (if the examples are accurate).
The ses files appear to contain traces only. So I assume you would import these over your already laid out components.
Perhaps two layers is for the free version?
There doesn’t seem to be anything Kicad specific, maybe they’ve only tested it with Kicad. It seems to come from a team doing a bunch of AI stuff, not a hardware focused team. So I can see there being issues.
I’m curious to see how well it works though.
Sadly another project designed by a software/AI guy who has little to no clue about the problem they are trying to solve.
When all I have is a hammer everything looks like a nail ...
I wonder whether this is from the same clueless people who were trying to sell an idea of AI-generated board layouts on Reddit not a long time ago.
Figured AI routing was a matter of time. Though I’d be more happy with a “guided” AI layout. Often I want some general layout with parts but don’t care too much of the specific routes. It’s tempting to add a more advanced routing tool to KiCad...
To quote a colleague: "Altium is used by those who are forced to do so"
The real reason why companies are invested so much in it, because they have knowledge in it and huge design libraries.
Now offering a way to convert those properly to KiCad and giving support for edge-cases, that would be a business opportunity.
I last used kicad in 2014 so perhaps my opinion is dated, but there was no competition then. I can't imagine an order of magnitude improvement has happened since.
Other random thoughts: real boards take weeks because signal integrity had to be taken into account. If I can just mash wires from point to point it doesn't take that long. Also: hobbyist kicad users won't pay for this service.
No expertise necessary - who the heck is the target demographic? Who is doing custom hardware these days that finds the PCB layout part of the design difficult (but amenable to autorouting?)