Eagle PCB or......?

@ FireyFate - look forward to seeing that as your radio project is v cool :slight_smile:

As @ Justin says Eagle has its quirks but once you get used to it, its pretty good. Design spark feels like it should be good but from my limited experience isnt. Also there are more parts available as eagle librarys etc and waaaay more tutorials out there.

Just remember my earlier comment. Once youā€™ve learnt Eagle, youā€™ll not want to spend time learning another package, so if you commit, you commit.

Design Spark, sure, you could look to that; itā€™s an RS ā€œoffshootā€ that theyā€™ve commissioned to drive sales of parts; does that place it in a strange place if the business model doesnā€™t work out, I donā€™t know, but perhaps. KiCAD to me would be the tool I would go to next, if I hadnā€™t made the Eagle commitment those few years ago.

Well, the thing is the only one that screams ā€œawesomeā€ to me is Altiumā€¦ and thatā€™s just based on the Youtube videos Iā€™ve seen.

I think Eagle is sort of hitting a sweet spot for me of being somewhat industry standard, while still being comparatively affordable.

I think in many places we can argue that industry standard is far from meaning bestā€¦ but it sure makes it easier to communicate with the PCB manufacturers that supply DRU files, and GHI/Sparkfun/etc of course provide Eagle files on their offerings.

I guess I already felt like that when I started this threadā€¦ I just wanted to make sure there wasnā€™t some stand out solution I hadnā€™t heard of.

Just looked at Altium. Looks pretty awesomeā€¦ along with the price.
Its a shame they dont do a version for hobbyists at a sensible price.

@ HughB - hail the new Hero :smiley:

Altium is flash and more than i can justify, but then again so are the tools you play with in your sand pitā€¦

Guess they sell enough to the grown ups to nit worry about a few $$ from the great unwashedā€¦

I donā€™t see clearly the add value of Altium. For now I am using Eagle on double side pcb about 130mm per 100 with an hundred of cms component and 20 THT. Finding component library is easy. However autorouter is really poor and I am using Freerouting as a complement. Most of wires are autorouted and I only need less than half a day to hand tune the result.

When you are talking in symposium that you are using Eagle CAD vendors often laugh but if thereā€™s no need to pay less than 1Kā‚¬ to have a tool that accompplish the same than a tool that cost 10x or even 100X more, at the end the only one that laugh is meā€¦

Altium is an awsome tool. I am lucky I was able to afford it for my work as the licensing allows you to have a copy at home :slight_smile:

The 3D capablity is one of the big sellers for me as I can fully model the likes of connectors in my designs and then export the 3D model to my CAD software and check that the panel or housing cutouts etc will match. Makes for small 1 or more off designs that work first time. Gone are the days of filling the holes to make it fit! :slight_smile:

If you could access the forum you would see a lot of talk aimed at Altium to produce a cutdown version for hobby use, in much the same way as other PCB CAD software does but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

A hobby version would introduce Altium to a whole new bread of designers who would probably suggest this software to any company they worked for. Sales volume would be increased over time.

@ Justin - Cheers mate :slight_smile:
I guess they do sell quite a lot. I really like hte routing capability and the 3d view and edit, but then again thats the sort of thing that blows my skirt up anyway. It does look polished though as it should for a $7k app !

@ Dave McLaughlin - How do Altium provide the 3D models for components etc? do they make them or do you have to medel them yourself?

Eagle and Design Sparks have also 3D capabilities and allow to extract POV-RAY file that you can load into 3D software. Of Course thereā€™s still bugs and a lot of components can not be extracted but this is promising

I may be wrong, but I donā€™t think Eagle outputs the 3D in a format that can be read with standard 3D CAD software. I think it only really allows output for the likes of POV-RAY so you can do a nice render of it.

If it offered STEP format then this is ideal and you can do some nice testing! :slight_smile:

It does offer Google SketchUp(or trimbal or whoever now) export, which can be converted to other formatsā€¦

I agree with this 1000%. Right now the small company I work for is still using horrible old ORCAD for Schematic captureā€¦ and we often just contract out the PCB layouts as we focus more on large systems.

Our IT guy was in town a couple weeks ago and was asking us if we had inputs on what weā€™d rather useā€¦ you could be sure that if I was using Altium at home and satisfied with it Iā€™d try to talk the powers above into paying for it.

On a different note he was saying he heard Solidworks had acquired a PCB routing software recentlyā€¦ we use that for our mechanical engineering already. Iā€™ve done a tiny bit of searching and havenā€™t come up with anything about that though.

I donā€™t use Altium, just listen to the Amp Hour where Dave Junes used to work for themā€¦ (you should listen to the show if you donā€™t - interesting for a lay-person like me to hear more about what full time electronics people do)

I suspect that the Value Add for many tools like this is not for a one-person org, itā€™s for the many-people-shared-development scenarios larger orgs are faced with. Iā€™m sure thereā€™s a lot of value, but for me itā€™s about simplicity to use when I use it so infrequently.

Eagle being a defacto standard is somewhat good, but again the limitations are potentially too restrictive for some things Iā€™d like to do (I bet those limits were last adjusted with Arduino shields in mind - which isnā€™t bad for most of our Fez work). But will I ever get around to exceeding the limits? Well, a bit of work and I can deal with most of them (and no more easy to hand solder 0806 pads for 0604 components, another minor niggle).

Again, if I had my time over, Iā€™d probably choose differently. Unless youā€™re in this for mainstream or near-mainstream work, youā€™re probably going to only learn oneā€¦

Hi Hugh,

In most cases, the manufacturers have 3D models available for most of their parts. Some you have to create. Altium has a basic extruded capability so you can build simple models for things like resistos and capacitors. I tend to use more detailed models only for connectors although I do have some nice 3D models of various ICā€™s you can download from the likes of 3D Content Central.

In some cases, for the likes of the GHI modules, I create my own within Alibre Design that I also have. You can then export as 3D Step format and import into Altium.

Really nice video of Altium 3D capability.

Daveā€¦

Thereā€™s no comparison between Altium and Eagle. Same, for example, about Cadence or Mentor.
But Eagle is affordable for single user and can go till a specific complexity, that is enough for our boards.
Altium goes far beyond and it has a learning curve much longer than Eagle. Altium cost is around $7.500 ā€¦ plus instruction costs.
I use both, although not as deep as can be done for Altium, but sometimes I scream with Altium because the component library really a complicate stuff for nothing most of the time and finding library itā€™s often difficult. So you go by hand creating your components. On the other end, in a company environment itā€™s really powerful letting you manage all the production line for PCB and hardware manufacturing. Not considering the powerful FPGA design environment. Using Vault you can centralize all component, library, rules and so on for projects working with many engineers.

Just a quick one on this. I now create my own parts as I need them or I copy them from the Altium libraries and then verify them 110%. Bit like, measure twice, cut once.

Having been bitten by library issues in the past I now do this for all parts. My mate who uses Pulsonix have the very same issue with a footprint for a Microchip part. Had 10 boards made and then discovered that the footprint was wrong. Expensive mistake so take the time to either verify 100% or roll your own.

Youā€™ll often see this on the Altium Forum. Most of the designers there say to roll your own or double checkā€¦

By the way, Eagle is pretty good. I used it before to work with a small open source board I needed to make changes to. Rather than load it into Altium (which can be done but is not 100%) I just used Eagle to make the changes.

Thanks for the tips guys. I laid out a decent bit of my schematic last night with Eagle.

They made some choices on how you interact with parts, nets, etc and how you move groups of them that really made me scratch my head. Definitely seems counter-intuitive to most other CAD type applications Iā€™ve usedā€¦ but I think Iā€™ve got enough knowledge to be dangerous now lol.

Iā€™m going to wait until I receive all my parts on order to finish breadboarding before I finish the schematic and move on to layout. Hopefully itā€™ll be ready to send off to DFRobot in the next 10 days or so.

Just to give a rough idea of what you can obtain in Altium, in the image is showed my DDS board with most part attached in 3d. Some are STEP file attached to lib components I have done, like gadgeteer connector (Samtec), D2PACK outline for voltage regulator and BNC connector. Other component are autoextruded with some paramenters.
After that you can create a movie showing board moving in all direction ā€¦ (if you have some show to do and time to waste).

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