Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So, as noted by yodon you have to go a long way through the website to figure out what this actually is:

https://atopile.io/atopile/essentials/1-the-ato-language

So the idea is you basically do all of your connections (the netlist) in code. That actually seems like a reasonable idea to me, especially for digital electronics.

However, I would say that schematic capture is only a small minority of the work of most circuit design. Probably 90% is creating components and layout/routing.

> If you want to layout or route PCBs you will need to install KiCAD.

I couldn't really figure out what the deal is with components. They have a website with a few packages on it (https://packages.atopile.io/) and they say:

> Check first-party packages for a list designed and used internally at atopile. Discussion planning to open this up publicly These are built, known to work and come with a functioning layout too.

Ah also I didn't realise this is actually a startup. Makes sense given how much effort seems to have gone into that website!

Our vision is not schematic capture, but intent capture. Once you can capture intent it can trickle down to schematics, layout, BOM selection etc. The language is pretty simple at the moment and building out from the 'minimum useful product' which is basically replacing the schematic.

The schematic is not most of the work, but it is the place that most of the work is relying on as a source of truth. Everything from firmware header files, end of line testing, reliability tests to service manuals. Today as an engineer you end up in the middle of that. Once you have a complete description, much of the boiler plate work can be automated.

We have done quite alot on the components and routing section of the work as well, we can generate most components for you automatically without leaving the IDE and have a growing list of fully auto-selected components. Instead of going to digkey to find a 10kohm 1% 0402, you can just give those specs to our tool and it will automatically pick the most suitable one for you, considering things like price and stock (plus eventually any other filtering you might care about, including custom libraries). For layout we currently just to layout reuse blocks, which is actually a crazy time saver for how simple it is. https://packages.atopile.io/ currently has ~10s of parts, but we are growing it over the next few weeks to ~thousands, so most parts you want to use will have a reference design + layout you can install and use in your project, just like you would NPM/pypi.

You're going to win and it's going to be easier than you ever imagined

Firmware is a good point!

I think relying on "we have a big set of components" is never going to work though. There are literally millions of components, often with unique footprints. You'll never cover even them all or even close to it. It needs to be easy to make your own.

Anyway good luck. PCB EDA could definitely do with some modernisation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com