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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing.

I think the main reason why open source has taken off is because access to a computer is available to many people, and as cost is negligible, it only required free time and enough dedication + skill to be successful. For hardware though, each compile/edit/run cycle costs money, software often has 5-digit per seat licenses, and thus the number of people with enough resources to pursue this as a hobby is quite small.

Reduce the entry cost to affordable levels, and you have increased the number of people dramatically. Which is btw also why I believe that "you can buy 32 core threadripper cpus today" isn't a good argument to ignore large compilation overhead in a code base. If possible, enable people to contribute from potatoes. Relatedly, if possible, don't require gigabit internet connections either, so downloading megabytes of precompiled artifacts that change daily isn't great either.

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Not only is the software expensive it's often crap. By which I don't mean, oh no it doesn't look nice - crap as in productivity-harming.

For example, Altium Designer is probably the most modern (not most powerful although close) PCB suite and yet despite costing thousands a seat it is a slow, clunky, single-threaded (in 2020) program (somehow uses 20% of a 7700k at 4.6GHz with an empty design). Discord also thinks that Altium Designer is some kind of Anime MMO

> Discord also thinks that Altium Designer is some kind of Anime MMO

Hardly Altium Designer's fault, but I too would avoid using it.

KiCad nightly can now import Altium Design files, might want to give it a try ;)

https://kicad-pcb.org/blog/2020/04/Development-Highlight-Alt...

KiCad is getting very good but it requires a lot of work to compete with the big boys - for example there's no signal integrity built in, and impedance control is fairly detached from your board i.e. I don't think you can do RC on impedance control yet. I don't need a huge amount but signal integrity is fairly important for the project I'm designing.

From what I can tell a lot of parametric design software is also single threaded. I felt like this is was an opportunity where usage of multiple cores could make Freecad stand out a little bit. Except Freecad uses opencascade as their kernel and they require you to sign a CLA just to download the git repository. Considering that barrier to just cloning the code I just decided to not contribute anything. They do offer zip file downloads of the source code but at that point I lost interest.

I suspect geometric kernels and 2D/3D renderers don't fall into the "easy to parallelize" category. Of course there are functions that use multiple threads, but it's not obvious how you could build the core system to do so. However the code in CAD software is often pretty old, it wasn't that long ago that many of these still used intermediate mode OpenGL and I wouldn't be surprised if some still do.

In the same vein something like ECAD tools don't use GPU-accelerated 2D rendering but instead use GDI and friends (which used to be HW-accelerated, but isn't since WDDM/Vista).

A lot of "easy" opportunities to improve UX and productivity.

It seems like it depends a lot on your representation of the circuit network. If you consider each trace and PCB element as a node in a graph which maps the connections of the traces and PCB elements then you could parallelize provided you can describe the boundary conditions at each node. There's a degree to which they're interdependent, but there are also nodes at which the boundary condition is effectively constant and I think those would make good cut points for parallelization.

SolveSpace now has some code paths multithreaded. It's not clear if this will make the next release but you can build from source with -fopenmp.

Like you say, it's kind of shocking to see one core running at 100 percent while the rest do nothing and the app is sluggish in 2020.

> Except Freecad uses opencascade as their kernel and they require you to sign a CLA just to download the git repository.

    git clone https://git.dev.opencascade.org/repos/occt.git

It's not well-advertised, but they do offer public read-only HTTP access to the git repository.[1] This URL really should be listed on the Resources page as well as the project summary in GitWeb.

[1] https://dev.opencascade.org/index.php?q=node/1212#comment-86...

I thought xpcb/gschem were decent although admittedly I’ve only ever tried PCB design once.

I believe you're talking about the EDA toolchain.

Even though it has a long history of open-source attempts, as pointed out by Tim in his presentation, they are few and far between, and massively underwhelming compared to the thriving open source software community.

However, if this initiative takes off, it'll be a big help in creating an open source EDA toolchain community.

> However, if this initiative takes off, it'll be a big help in creating an open source EDA toolchain community.

The opensource EDA toolchain community is already producing some good stuff, Symbiflow: https://symbiflow.github.io/ is a good example, it's an open source FPGA flow targeting multiple devices. It uses Yosys (http://www.clifford.at/yosys/) as a synthesis tool which is also used by the OpenROAD flow: https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD-flow which aims to give push-button RTL to GDS (i.e. take you from Verilog, which is one of the main languages used in hardware to the thing you give to the foundry as a design for them to produce).

The Skywater PDK is a great development, which is a key part of a healthy opensource EDA ecosystem though there's plenty of other great developments happening in parallel with it you will note there's some people who are involved in several of these projects they're not all being developed in isolation. The next set of talks on the Skywater PDK include how OpenROAD can be used to target Skywater: https://fossi-foundation.org/dial-up/

Very similar to what you just said, I suspect that a driving factor in the state of open source in hardware is that anyone working in hardware almost be definition has a large corporate backing, since producing hardware is so capital intensive (compared to software).

If that is basically a given, why publish anything for free, when you can instead charge 10k/seat in licensing?

Possibly because initially the open source software will be significantly worse than the proprietary software and thus won't get any sales, and it will only be better with a lot of contributions, but then it's already freely available and so it still won't get any sales (but might get support/SaaS contracts).

Sounds like there should be open source software for such a thing? I bet the software for laying out transistors and so on will suddenly become viable with something like this, good idea Google!

There is open source software, a good overview is on http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/index.html.

Ripe for some innovation maybe...

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