CircuitMaker: a free PCB design tool powered by Altium

I've been getting my feet wet again; perhaps Altium has fixed the UX which drove me away originally but they don't seem (until now?) to have had any entry-level appropriate pricing.

And whilst I could pick up Eagle 7 recently and get productive again real quick, the fact that I still had to draw my own PCB footprints which are intrinsically inseparable from the overall component definition is so disappointing.

A separate PCB footprint library, separate in the sense that component packages should be normalized and trivially re-usable across devices without error-prone copy-pasta madness seemed painfully obvious 10 years ago and it's still painfully obvious now. Drawing a new schematic symbol and wiring that up to physical pins in a PCB footprint is no big deal, but I just hate having to draw a new PCB footprint from a datasheet. Even on the off-chance that you can copy-paste from some other device with similar enough package, you still end up with inconsistent silkscreen/gate naming conventions etc. because each part library author does things differently.

  The idea of paying for more extensions seems incredibly 
  frustrating. I'd rather know what the cost will be upfront.

It's not an unreasonable price for big companies (if it boosts the productivity of an engineer costing $100k+) but there's a lot of people who aren't going to spend $7,000 (anyone who isn't doing PCB design full time as a profession). If Altium want to sell something that costs less than $7000 (maybe $200-$500 for a perpetual license like Eagle) they will either have to:

(a) Take far less money from their existing $7,000 customers or (b) Provide a cut-down version that meets the needs of the $200-$500 market without replacing the $7,000 product.

Much though I'd like it if they did (a), I think they're a lot more likely to do (b).

Not knowing what threshold of "diverse and challenging" triggers "purchase enhancements" makes this something I have no interest in being locked into. If they had a list of add on functionality with price, sure, but unspecified? No way.

Does the autorouter come for free? Or is it a $1000 add on? Component library? Board size limitations? Number of layers? 3D modeling? IDF export and import? Putting arbitrary graphics into the silkscreen? Heck, gerber file export? Website is way too light on information for me to touch this with a 10 foot pole.

Disclosure I am a co-founder of CircuitHub.

* Our default account is free & open-source. * We've made UX a huge priority * We've got the largest and most complete component library in the world * We have an open source project for converting all of the ugly old propriety formats into an open, documented json format * We monetize through privacy similar to github

And we've built a whole bunch of magic into Upverter that none of the other tools can even touch:

* 5 min setup: Nothing to install, maintain, no versions, no patches, no virtual machines, no need for Windows NT or some outdated OS to run the software etc. It's all online, pretty easy.

* Fully collaborative, and version controlled: You can see who made which change, when, roll changes back and fourth, including in editor issue tracking - all the same perks as designing software.

* Intuitive: Modern UI and UX, no infinite menus or buried features - our biggest user feedback is that Upverter is simply way, way easier to use than anything else.

* 10x Faster: parts are easier to create, you can do schematics and layouts at the same time, you can use open source parts, and build on open source reference designs, reuse modules... no syncing netlists, and no wasted effort.

* 10x cheaper: ($40 per user per month.) No huge upfront payment, and no hidden "maintenance" charges. Altium just jacked their prices up to $10K for a single user licence, Mentor and Orcad are just as bad and were seeing a lot of inbound because of it.

* Agile and responsive. Our support team is our dev team. If they can push some code to make your life easier overnight, it will happen. If you run into a problem, they will fix it in real time.

* Designed for growth. Sharing, collaboration, version control, flex users - you name it, its baked it. You wont run into a wall in 3 months, and you wont need to switch packages when you raise more money.

* Table stakes. It does everything that any of the other packages do. You dont have to give up any performance, complexity, or sophistication - so most of this is magic, extra, and unique to Upverter.

+ More of our Magic Features: IPC generators / BGA generators, Generics, Real-time design rule checking, Trace ghosting & Net highlighting when routing, Fast toggle between schematic & layout / Multi monitor support, Auto sync & save, Unlimited persistent undo, redo, In-design issue tracking, Fast module creation for design reuse, Auto schematic routing, Flex users, sharing, embedding, Real-time design collaboration, Cross probing

I really recommend you check it out! upverter.com

So it probably comes down to what is core and what is an extension.

Presumably it's an entry-level product following a pricing model like EAGLE; limits to commercial use/board size/number of components/ layers/connections /schematic sheets.

[1] http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-designer-new-pric...

I have no experience with Altium at all, I found this via Twitter and through the EEVblog where it's been mentioned since the guy running the blog seems to have hope/interest in it.

For me it'll probably not be very interesting, since I totally expect it to be Windows only. What do folks with experience with Altium's products think?

Each PCB design package has its own programming language, here's an example of what you can do with Eagle's ULP: http://irq5.io/2013/03/30/circular-layout-ulp-for-eagle/

Edit: I suppose you're talking about something more declarative like Eg. povray scripts, I'm not aware of such a thing.

Edit2: Eagle's .brd/.sch files are actually XML, FWIW, and from the git diffs I've done from time to time between commits - almost human readable (but perhaps not human writable).

Edit3: Agree with jimmyswimmy, there are so many compromises, trade-offs and optimizations going on which (for me at least) require the visual cues when placing parts and routing traces. Sometimes even the 2D visualization on the screen seems inadequate, when you get a board fabbed and see it assembled & fitted, sometimes you have that... oh damn, I wish I had seen it like that, I would have done X.

On the other hand, the schematic requires no graphical representation and is easily written as a netlist. SPICE works in netlists and most (all?) PCB packages import a netlist. If you wish to represent a schematic as code, that's the way to do it.

My initial opinion notwithstanding, if you write a program to let me compile gerbers from code, I'll try my hand at writing a PCB out.

Part of the point of PCB design is that it's a _design_ process. You need to make executive decisions about where you can place those components. Things like connectors and interfaces absolutely need to be manually placed (or at least have defined locations).

In principle what you're asking is simple - you pass in the netlist and manually place important components and then let the autorouter do the rest. In practice you have to think about:

- Grounding schemes - Differential traces - Thermal management - Isolation - Analog/Digital separation - Grounding/stitch vias - Potential room for expansion in the future so board revisions have minimal impact

Don't forget that at least some of PCB design is 'artistic'. Your boards should be beautiful!

To visualize a PCB like that as 'code' would require you to perform a feat similar to keeping the whole execution state of a program you wrote in your head rather than just the local scope. I don't think anybody (except maybe Chuck Moore, and he designs interactively too) can do that.

And so we chose for graphical interaction. If you can get your idea to the point where it is possible to take a textual description of a schematic and compile down to placement data, silkscreen, tracks+pads and a Gerber file then I would be very happy to be one of your guinnea pigs.

I like Fritzing. I'm just a hobbyist, but having tried other PCB layout tools (Eagle, etc), Fritzing is the only one I've actually been able to be productive with.