Orcad compared to others?

[Mengano]

Giving OrCad a test drive and it's pretty powerful and "not that bad" as far as learning curve. 

One thing interesting is a 1 year Time Based License of OrCad Professional costs about the same as the annual license maintenance fee of Altium except you don't have to buy the program like you do Altum.  Never thought I'd see the day, but Cadence now has a competing program that is less expensive than Altium.

Still taking the program through its paces but have to admit it's impressive so far.  The autorouter blows away the one from Altium and the program seems very stable.  The 3D STEP model capabilities have DRC checks available while Altium doesn't.   Have another couple weeks to evaluate and will report more pros and cons later

[timofonic]

Necroposting, but for a good and historical cause...

How things have changed since them? I'm now forced to use Cadence and I find it very powerful, but now I laugh about myself when I complained about

- How messy was Eagle:
* It has TONS of annoying quirks in the UI part.
* I somewhat liked the cli concept despite being quite underdeveloped to my taste (I would love to be like zsh). I'm a mix of an *NIX cli + streamlined GUI fan and I find both emacs & vi(m) too weird.
* It has a really crappy autorouter to the point one made in the spare time of a retired Zuken developer was a lot better. No offense, I'm quite sure he's quite good at it, but he's only one person compared to a development team, but maybe 10000 Lemmings are less than 4 geniouses.
- How weird and "transitioning phase" KiCad is:
* Please kill Legacy canvas insanity ASAP and make GAL usable with at least all the features of the former one. I'm sure many of their devs agree with that, but I understand KiCad needs a big overhaul in order to become a robust project so groundwork needs to be done before.
** They are slowly improving and making menus more sane, that's nice.
** It remembers me a bit like a weird OrCAD, but more messy to use in certain aspects.I don't used so much other EDA packages, no idea about the differences in GUI and UX.
* They are getting internationalization, that's great and a killer app compared to mainstream software!
** I think their next goal should be to i18n their site and make a lot more stronger community, instead having a bunch of segregated and uncommunicated communities.
*** KiCad.jp looks promising and deserves more nexus points by some good bilingual people. The others seems relatively non-existent from my point of view, or at least not enough organized to be visible. It's true many tech people are getting very used to English, that makes them less interested in their local community and become international
* There's the good news: They are starting to get a bit more sane. They are making a stronger and slowly more organized team and the result is surprising, volunteers are appearing from nowhere!
** I think the current oligopoly and the support from CERN is a great opportunity.
** I think they should get 1000x more resources, but I understand that's difficult.
** They should concentrate at education and small companies/freelancers/hobbyists, but big smart nerds like CERN are a great opportunity to provide many good features too.
** I think interoperability ought to be a priority that needs to be really organized and scientifically measured!
*** Electronics is an extremely very hostile and vendor lock-in oligopoly world, they'll make it very difficult to a newcomer and specially one that might hurt their profits of their extremely overpriced and inefficient software (they are very featured, but ridiculously bloated and lots of nonsense, I laughed when found Firefox inside Allegro!).
**** That happened with Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice. SUN and Oracle just wanted it as a way of branding, but now LibreOffice is getting momentum (now it sucks less, despite it requires more love in the math part and stop taking hard drugs to copy newer Microsoft Office versions), The Document Liberation Project concept ought to be transitioned to EDA/CAD/CAM world too.


Here's an Altium vs Cadence opinion from 2012, but very detailled. I don't know if thingschanged since then.

What about Fritzing and Circuit Wizard? They are nice too!

[jeroen74]

Anyone remember SmartART? I guess one of the first DOS based PCB programs. With a command line and it used wind-direction orientation. (e.g. west to go left, north to go up).

SmartWork , not smartart. later became HiWire. Made by winTek. ran under dos

yep.

dip 40 600 e   

gave you a 40 pin dip 600 mils rowpitch drawn from bottome left to bottom right ( pin 1 was bottom left corner. so the body was extended eastward ( north being top of the screen )

f1 place pad
f2 remove pad
f3 place track
f4 remove track
f5 toggle wide/ narrow

Smartwork was the ONLY program that would automatically shave Ic pads so it could place a track between them. !

i made lots of boards with that thing... 320x200 resoltion on CGA... later they had an EGA version (640x400)

those were the days.. (grampa mode)

You can download SmartWork from vetusware.com and run it in DOSBox.

[timofonic]

EDACafe: PCB Tools, Part 1: Zuken, Mentor, Cadence, Altium


Interesting article with opinions from some of the EDA moguls. I miss Keysight (they are an enterprise-only EDA software, right?) and maybe some other so this can be called "EDA Mafia Opines"

[timofonic]

Any brave soul would like to compare EDA tools in this 2016?

[timofonic]

Bump!

(None is brave enough for this madness, I understand it!)

[Gribo]

I'll bite:
Orcad 16 Capture (Not allegro) - Interface retains the OrCad feel, with some of its quirks and strange behavior. I didn't manage to use OrCad layout much.
It didn't crash on my medium size design of ~300 components and DB based library during my 1 month evaluation period.
Library creation and component update is still less intuitive than in Altium designer's.
DB connection is a bit arcane, but the documentation is good enough to get you started.
Going back to two separate modules from Altium's unified workflow is a pain in the rear.

Altium designer (15):
Schematic and layout are very easy and intuitive. It crashed several times, due to corrupted workspace files.
On the same design complexity, Altium layout is much, much more fluid and responsive.
Library and DB connection are very easy, the online documentation is good enough to get you started with them.
Design import from OrCad caused few issues, mainly with GND and power symbols.

All tests where done on a core i5 4500, with 6GB RAM and on-board graphics.

Sadly, I didn't test the latest PADS VX, my workplace was shut down and I lost my job.

[PChi]

My view of PADS is that the documentation is poor. The library management complicated. The schematic editor poor and the layout to Gerber tool bad. I don't have any experience of laying out a PCB with it so perhaps that parts works OK.

[Daxxin]

... and Vanguard ............and Daisy and Circuitmaker and others.

Hi , what about Vanguard ?? never heard befor , still for sale?

[timofonic]

... and Vanguard ............and Daisy and Circuitmaker and others.

Hi , what about Vanguard ?? never heard befor , still for sale?

I would like to know about that. The name sounds intriguing, so Vanguard-ist

[PCB.Wiz]

Any brave soul would like to compare EDA tools in this 2016?

2016 is shaping up for "interesting times" in EDA.

The big players dabble in the lower cost end, but are rather like Intel trying to get back into Microcontrollers via IoT ...
Sometimes, a 600lb gorilla just lacks finesse 

Mentor released a crippled/nobbled version of PADS at Digikey, but it is Closed Binary and Subscription aka hostage sales model.
You have to keep paying them money to access your own data, and this idea has been panned on the Blogs.

Meanwhile, OrCAD have moved to offer 'free' OrCAD, which means pay 1 years support, but at least with their approach, you can still use it in 2017.  (SCH only?)
The sales pitch is "Support is so good, you will want to keep paying"
Maybe that is true, but at least a carrot is better than the stick Mentor plan to use ?

I see now Digikey hedge their bets, with ever-more CAD offerings, that are not hostage-ware :

http://www.digikey.com/en/resources/design-tools/quadcept
Looks interesting, out of Japan ?
http://www.digikey.com/en/resources/design-tools/pcbweb

but the real sea change in EDA, is around libraries.

As the Component Suppliers get into EDA, they want their parts in your design, and they do that via libraries.

RS have a nice looking ECAD Part Wizard that can search, and download SCH and PCB footprints in ASCII format.

Of course, once you can download library symbols easily, that captive side of many EDA tools quietly goes away, and the big Closed-Data EDA players will wake up one morning, and wonder what happened.

[chris_leyson]

Orcad 16.6 schematic capture is almost identical to Orcad 10 in look and feel, Layout is a huge improvement over the old Orcad. Capture CIS for parts database is a bit of a pain, it takes a lot of work. For Orcad PCB the constrains manager can be a bit daunting and the 3D step mapping tools are more or less useless if you have to change step file origin or axes, I have to resort to using an external CAD program to get the orientation of some parts just right, connectors seem to be the worst offenders.
I have a colleague who prefers Altium so there probably isn't much difference between Cadance and Altium.
2016 pricing isn't bad, much the same as it was for Orcad 10 fifteen years ago.

[ebclr]

If you want to have a feel on Altium

Try circuitmaker.com for free , it's a downgrade online version of Altium, to be used on opensource hardware