*EasyEDA - Web based EDA official support topic*

[Bored@Work]

The funny thing is that GNU/Linux took over everything else. From coffee makers to military equipment.

Alexander.

Please talk about http://easyeda.com/ 

Ok. It does not run on Linux. On-topic enough for your taste?

[firewalker]

One thing that I would like to see is right click menus.

Is it possible to pop-out the schematic editor? PCB layout is typically a multi screen process.  It would be nice to have to schematic on a separate screen.

Tested on Firefox 28 on GNU/Linux (ArchLinux).

Alexander.

[firewalker]

BTW I loved the really simple account creation method.

Alexander.

[firewalker]

Errors should contain some infos.



Alexander.

[dillon]

One thing that I would like to see is right click menus.

Is it possible to pop-out the schematic editor? PCB layout is typically a multi screen process.  It would be nice to have to schematic on a separate screen.

Tested on Firefox 28 on GNU/Linux (ArchLinux).

Alexander.

We are not plan to support right click menus now, because we should make this product easy, we don't know how to create functions for this menu. You know we have lots of Hotkeys.

Your firefox support many separated Tabs, so you can open as many http://easyeda.com/editor as you want.
A tab for schematic, a tab for PCB, A tab for lib, .......

Thanks.

[dillon]

Errors should contain some infos.



Alexander.

This is unexpected error, I hope can remember what you have done just now.

Dillon

[dillon]

Errors should contain some infos.

This is unexpected error, I hope can remember what you have done just now.

even though i have no objection with what happened (generic error handling, i understand with newly developed SW) but placing flag number might help developer to narrow the plethora of unexpected errors. just my 2cnts.

Got it. Thanks.

[eenewbies]

Awesome online EDA tool! Love the UI, will try it out ASAP.  Thanks.

[eenewbies]

My test schematic, Like it now.

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

Yeah but...

[nctnico]

The realtime DRC (check for clearance) seems to be missing. It looks like a lot of work went into it. It's a pity that effort wasn't directed towards improving Kicad. From all the open source electronics design packages Kicad seems to have the largest momentum (being aided by CERN).

[dillon]

The realtime DRC (check for clearance) seems to be missing. It looks like a lot of work went into it. It's a pity that effort wasn't directed towards improving Kicad. From all the open source electronics design packages Kicad seems to have the largest momentum (being aided by CERN).

Realtime DRC is on the road.  Building an EDA software is hard, web based EDA is harder than desktop software.

Kicad is good, but not easy. EasyEDA will try to change something.

Thanks to give http://easyeda.com a try.

[nctnico]

You could change Kicad and make it easier to use. That is the beauty of open source. Kicad is based on the WxWidgets framework. Appearantly there have been some efforts to use a webserver as a WxWidgets backend (*) to render the screen so an application can also be used in a webbrowser.

(*) WxWidgets is split in a frontend (the API) and a backend which takes care of rendering the screen, receiving input and handling OS specific stuff.

[jimjam]

I've just tried easyeda and it is quite nice. I posted a question here about Kicad and I'm wondering about the same thing with easyeda.

Say I have this circuit:

Code: [Select]

-----||------||-----
     C1      C2
Basically, two capacitors connected to each other in series (as an example). When I moved C2 further apart to the right, how can I make it so the connection between C1 and C2 stays so I don't have to re-wire it?

[jimjam]

Suggestion: implement "Search feature" in the "Explore" section. I assume I can browse around, clone a project (do I have to clone it?) and order a PCB based on that design? It would be handy if you could include the components too

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

press 'g' first and release. then you are in drag mode, then drag one of the caps.

[jimjam]

press 'g' first and release. then you are in drag mode, then drag one of the caps.

THANK YOU! That works with Kicad too!

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

Lol, I thought you meant Kicad.

[dillon]

I've just tried easyeda and it is quite nice. I posted a question here about Kicad and I'm wondering about the same thing with easyeda.

Say I have this circuit:

Code: [Select]

-----||------||-----
     C1      C2
Basically, two capacitors connected to each other in series (as an example). When I moved C2 further apart to the right, how can I make it so the connection between C1 and C2 stays so I don't have to re-wire it?

Maybe this is a good feature. I will keep it to our long TODO list

[boz]

Hi Guys

Just thought I'd chip in my 10 cents worth..

I have no affiliation with EasyEDA other than as a user but I've been using EasyEDA for 3 months now and have had 5 PCB's made using it, one of which is in production, I was a bit sceptical at first but now I am sold, it just works and it works really well.

I have used the free version and then a paid version of Eagle for the last 7 years, about 9 months ago I had to create a 160mm x 20mm board for some LEDs and eagle wouldn't let me without paying US$495 (and I could not upgrade my basic licence so no discount!) I eventually used KiCad for this and decided to then migrate to KiCad, however I never really got the hang of the KiCad UI and libraries and kept going back to Eagle. (More a fault with me than with Kicad I guess)

I was a bit sceptical of on-line CAD tools for the same reason Dave was but I was stuck at an airport for several hours a few months back and saw the article on dangerous prototypes and gave it a go, basically I imported a complete eagle project into the system captured all my libraries and footprints without any problems, then I re-did the circuit and created a board all within a few hours.

It is weird not using the right-click after using eagle but it's actually very intuitive and you soon get the hang of it and the shortcut keys work really well, any problems I have had have been rectified almost immediately by the developers which I guess is because the user base is still quite small and there are still a few more promising enhancements in the pipeline such as version control.  The most recent version of the software is very stable on my browser, (chrome) and I would certainly recommend anyone using eagle to give this a go with a real project.

A little caveat here is that I have only made double sided boards which go down to 0.5mm SMT (probably about the limit for hobbyists), the quality and finish of the boards I got back was excellent and they are actually manufactured by seeed, both boards shown below were created and manufactured using EasyEDA, the photo quality and my build quality are not that great, the boards are much nicer in real life. I have not yet created anything more complicated than this eg BGA, 4-layer or 0.4mm pitch, but I do not see any reasons why it would not work as well as the ones below.

The development may not be open source (yet) but should the venture not work they have promised to ensure all your work can be exported to KiCad or other CAD packages and then give away the system for free. I cannot argue with this philosophy.

Boz

[dillon]

Thank you Boz, Never think you will spend lots of time to give a +1 comment at here.

The development may not be open source (yet) but should the venture not work they have promised to ensure all your work can be exported to KiCad or other CAD packages and then give away the system for free

We will provide API to allow everyone to export their projects to other EDA format in three months,  first to Kicad, Eagle , Then Altium Designer.  EasyEDA's file format is public, every one can use it.

Thanks

Dillon

[boz]

Thank you Boz, Never think you will spend lots of time to give a +1 comment at here.

No problem, Just saying it as it is, keep up the good work. 

[SirNick]

Interesting concept.  I imagine this has potential in the casual hobbyist space, and as a platform for (excuse the repurposed phrase) "social" engineering (you know, "hey look at my circuit..")  There is a bit of a hole in that market, so good on ya.   

Still, while I do see the trend of things moving to virtual computing (it's mainframes all over again), for serious applications, I think CAD is one of those things best tied to the native platform.  I.e., for Windows, build a native Windows app.  For Linux, build a Linux app.  etc. etc.  HTML, JS, Java... these things have their uses, but efficiency is not their forte.  When you get to big designs, it's hard enough to keep native software snappy, much less trying to achieve graphics-heavy performance with interpreted or JIT languages.

I couldn't be convinced to create a 1,000 pin design to prove this to myself, but I would be curious to see if you could pan and scroll a document that large, in a web browser environment, and not have to go on coffee breaks waiting for the screen to redraw.  Is there a demo to this effect?

[Bored@Work]

HTML, JS, Java... these things have their uses, but efficiency is not their forte.  When you get to big designs, it's hard enough to keep native software snappy,

Actually, for some time now good JITs reach the performance of native, e.g. completely compiled ahead of time, software.

There are several reasons software written with a language with an underlying JIT can still appear slower:

1. Startup time, size and other resources needed by the interpreter and JIT.

2. The overhead until a JIT has finally kicked in and done the job.

3. Sloppy written code.

much less trying to achieve graphics-heavy performance with interpreted or JIT languages.

Most electronics CAD stuff is not even graphics-heavy. Like rendering a schematic or a 2D PCB.

But lets say it is. The issue has become more and more an issue of hardware, aka GPUs, their specific APIs, like OpenGL, the language-specific binding of the API, and, once again, talent and skills of the programmer. It is typically not a problem of a JIT language.

To give you an example where JIT-based, graphics-heavy, code is routinely executed fast: Graphics-heavy games on Android. Java as a language, compiled to Java bytecode, then translated to Google's own Dalvik bytecode, plus, depending on the setup, also pre-compiled optimized Dalvik bytecode, executed on the phone by the Dalvik virtual machine, which has a JIT and might generate and cache optimized Dalvik bytecode on the fly.

Or to give an example where a completely ahead compiled EDA program is dead slow: KiCad schematics rendering. The reason for that is it is badly programmed. You don't have to have a JIT-language to write bad code. Even PCs in the 80th had enough CPU power to render these lines. AFAIK KiCad is now moving to OpenGL to speed things up.

[SirNick]

OK, schooled.