Upverter Gets Your Circuits Laid
blog.upverter.com
blog.upverter.com
When you make claims like "the worlds most sophisticated layout tool" you're making impossible claims. I've yet to see anything that your tool does that Protel (now Altium) and others weren't doing a decade ago.
I understand different markets, but at $299 / user / month for your "professional" offering, you're not too far off of Altium Designer's cost. You're roughly double Eagle's price, and yours is a subscription service, rather than a pay once and done.
It appears you also have to pay separately for simulation - another cost that Altium and Eagle do not have.
You make pricing hard to find on your website. I'm looking for pricing, not a "try upverter now" button - to me that says "get the demo", not "pricing". Your package names look like something designed picked by someone just out of college and trying overly hard to be hip, not something meant to convey any meaning. "Open Source" "Awesome" and "Professional" - really? Why not just "Free" "Personal" and "Professional"? Conveys what you get with each package much quicker and more clearly. You have very little about what's included with each package. For instance, what's a "Team+User" account type vs a "User". How much simulation time is included with each package, since you make a reference to paying for only what you use? What's the cost of additional simulation time?
From your "Professional" registration page: "Welcome, Professional. This is going to be awesome!" Really? Awesome? I thought "Awesome" was your middle-tier package. It creates confusion and impressions you may not want.
Too much emphasis on buzzwords. Do you really need to use "cloud" that often? How about "Awesome!"?
Your "Terms of Use" basically say you're not responsible for the security of anything. Not something you want when you're trying to entice people into doing creative work with your service. You say you can end the service whenever you want with the only notification being via the webpage - Not something to make businesses shell out $3588 / year. Likewise, you say you're able to revoke access entirely or in part without notification, and that the website may be unavailable at times, and that you may, at your discretion, delete a user's uploaded data.
From a business standpoint, these terms are completely unacceptable - would you pay $3588 / year with no guarantee that you'd be able to use the service, or that you'd be able to access your data?
As a hobbyist, are you willing to have all your work and data disappear on a third party's whim?
From a business customer standpoint, I'd rather pay the extra to Altium, sink the cost of the software, pay half your yearly cost for Altium's subscription, and keep my propitiatory data in-house, instead of trusting an unknown 3rd party's claims to privacy, security, and longevity. Knowing where Protel was a decade ago - I'll also say that their software does a lot more than yours, again putting your claims at being the "most sophisticated" in question.
From a hobbyist standpoint, I'm still not comfortable putting things that are as tedious to reproduce as schematics and board layouts under the control of a third party. Eagle "Standard" is $169 (individual hobbyist use), and the copy will be good as long as I have a computer that will run it. That cost just over two years of paying for your "Awesome" package. Eagle "Light" is $69, less than one year of your "Awesome" package, and I again have something that lasts as long as I maintain a computer that can run it. I can buy a new "Light" package every year and still save money over your service.
Just looking at the last project I did and the features I could not have done without, do you have differential pair routing? Interactive length tuning? From-tos? Pin swapping? Integration with some part swapping system for the manufacturer? Export and then reimport of DSNs for Electra/Specctra? Polygon pours? Integration with PLMs? Use scripting engine?
As far as working with Altium goes, those features are all pretty basic.
Hopefully tools like these will eventually get better to the point where put a bit of pressure on the big guys to make them lower their prices though!
What exactly does this mean? How does this differ from Eagle where schematic changes are immediately reflected in the rat's nest?
It'll be interesting to see what kind of computational constraints they put on the inevitable autorouter.
In Eagle, you cannot add new parts directly to the PCB (no layout duplication for panelization). Panelization is about the only place I have ever wanted that feature, as the abstract schematic is much nicer for connecting nodes. Although, I guess since I haven't tried it, I could be wrong. I'm not entirely sure why there is that limitation, but it would be a pretty nice feature.
Couple other points:
Full real-time design rule checking
Eagle does not do real time DRC. Although, as I've yet to really have problems with a DRC (most PCB milling machines are awesome, and you don't really have anything to worry about).
A system of automated footprint generators based on the IPC standards
That would be way better if I could supply a PDF from the data sheet, your software looks at the dimensions and gives me the footprint back.
Eh? Don't know why you'd ever not worry about DRC. If the PCB fab is that good, make your features smaller :P. You also want to always make sure that you're not violating your electrically-significant constraints.
And yeah, footprints are quite annoying (especially when starting out) and one of the things that I think a widely-shared online approach like Upverter will actually succeed in fixing for the common cases.
I haven't made any boards for manufacturing, only one off boards. I like to keep things spaced out so if I need to get in and cut/jumper I can. Soon though, I'll make a board for manufacture. Then the DRC come into play.
I dislike the uncertainty in the footprints. I just sent a board out with a footprint I made, and I didn't have the parts yet to see if they would fit the dimensions. It's all a big guessing game. The Sparkfun library is pretty awesome in that regard (sharing files). I like how they say 'Production tested', keeping quality up when tons of people on Upverter are making footprints may be hard, although if you have a hundred or so 'tested' footprints you might be in the clear.
I've done mostly prototype work, but rework isn't much harder with tighter design rules. Also keep in mind a good amount of possible cutting/jumpering/airwiring can be avoided with the right use of infinite and zero ohm resistors at layout time. I unfortunately haven't touched embedded design in a while - moved on to software for more ambitious goals; unfortunately, das blinkenlights aren't so applicable to the problems of the world that are important to me.
> Same time schematic & PCB editing...
If this means you tweak the schematic and the PCB updates at the same time - that's good. I think. How well does it cope with 4 / 8 / 12 layer boards? Or are those not realistic use cases?
> PCB Editing! Woot!
Why would someone want to edit the PCB? Is it to make things suitable for production? ("This bulky component is too close to the edge and interferes with production machine loading. Let's move it over there a bit"?) Or are there other uses?
Components are available in a variety of packages, and supply problems sometimes require a last-minute change.
Thermal or EMI or noise problems require moving traces away from each other.
If you stop paying, the designs will remain intact, stay private and you will be able to export them freely. If you want to keep editing the designs, they will have to be made public at that point. (Or you can start paying again. ;))
I only see a future for this product if they license the software for installation on private servers.
It's a shame too many of these product announcements subtly discriminate against women, and frequently minorities.
Why not a more descriptive title such as "Upverter Releases Sophisticated Circuit Layout Tool"?
Congratulations to the Upverter team, but try to be more sensitive next time.
The joke is at least sophomoric, if not crass as others have pointed out.
Those are virtues in a joke.
But...
I don't think Upverter was trying to discriminate, nor do I think anyone should take real offense at their title. I just think that little jokes like this often recurring does have a negative impact on our ability to attract women to (and have them thrive in) technical roles.
Given that, would you use that product and service if only people who dress like 12 year olds use it? I suspect you might avoid it, assuming you were the sort of person who cared about that sort of perception.
Or here, let me try it in terms of variables:
A: The people who are always talking about B
B: The product, service, or career they're talking about
C: The group they appear to be part of
D: You.
E: People who might look at you (D) and think you are a (C) because of your association with (B), because of the presentations put forth by (A).
If you don't make any of these connections, you may not be affected by this. However, it could still affect those who do make those connections.
It raises the question, which is worse, false flagging of gender bias where there isn't any, or widespread gender bias? Obviously the latter. But the former does seem weirdly counter productive, if you want to avoid putting people off, then don't put people off by false flagging things that aren't there.
In trying to see the other side of the debate: I'm sure a woman has written such a headline before, but I would imagine it's been targeted at female audiences(this could be gender bias on my part though). I might imagine the likelihood of a male writing an inappropriate bla bla "gets you laid" headline at a supposedly neutral audience is higher than a woman doing so(my gender bias again?).
I suppose also as a man writing a "gets you laid" headline, you're making assumptions about the high male/female ratio of your target audience. Most men I know, know such talk can make them unpopular with female readers. (although this could just be presumption and not actual fact, maybe female readers wouldn't give a hoot)
So those assumptions made by writing such a headline, will be obvious to the reader and off putting. Even if it wasn't obvious whether the writer was male or female, between industry stereotypes and gender bias, most people would assume such a headline about a cloud based circuit cad tool would be written by a man,(again possibly my bias).
What's my point? I don't have one, but best to play it on the safe side.
Induction is much more likely to convert the person you're talking to than deduction, as it gets around values to a degree.
When I saw this headline, it elicited a minor "groan" from me, since it reminded me of some less-desirable elements within the greater community. It, on some level, reminds me that sometimes I wish I was doing something else.
This plugs into what I said before.
Both men and women get laid.
Sources:
[1] PCB layout: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:srb7R1n...
[2] Page 41: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dsmith/dsmith.html
[3] Google Groups Discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.cad...
[4] PDF: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_573/Asynchr_Febr_200...
Did you read your references? This one has nothing to do with electronics.
The other three all use "laying out a circuit". None of them used "laid". Luckily there are very many search hits for "laid out a circuit" (some about cycling, etc) or "laid out a PCB", so it's common usage. But "Gets your circuits laid" is clear sexual innuendo.
Sure, layout is common terminology in EDA. Getting laid is not.
I request you swap to trying to make another language dowdy and unfun. I (and most English speakers the world over) love its capacity for wordplay.
My rhymes and my records they don't get played / because my records and rhymes, they don't get made / 'cause when you rap like me you don't get paid / and when you roll like me you don't get laid.
More seriously though, the title is extremely childish and doesn't really help to make me want to trust their service with my company's valuable data...
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit...
</sarc>
Source:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121026/local/Cou...
First impressions count. Upverter is really cool. How many people have missed the opportunity to be upverter users because of this bad pun? Perhaps more importantly, how many customers did upverter not get because of the bad humour?
They are free to use whatever language they like to talk about their project. Other people are free to be disappointed at the choice of language; or to be put off by the words used; or to not care about the language.