Altium Designer 14 . sneak preview

[Rufus]

Where did you get this info - can't find the announcement anywhere?  The download links for the vaults are not updated to 1.2

email from Altium. Announced != released.

No availability date was given, sorry if I should have made that clear.

[reagle]

Just installed 14.1. Release notes mention lotsa bug fixes and crashes. We shall see, but so far (one day of running) it's been much more stable than 14.0.
This is on a 64 bit machine with 16G of RAM

[free_electron]

been running it since yesterday. it is more stable

[kaz911]

Any clue about the forcoming versions?

No news yet...

And I do wonder if any senior people at Altium have seen the video and comments.
I know it's gone around a bit, but not sure how high up.
Perhaps some people might like to remind them how important they think this is

http://www.altium.com/en/altium/altium-leadership/executive-team

email:
FirstName.LastName@altium.com

I just had a "conversation" with a EU Altium representative - they sent out "special christmas" offers - but the price was not in my league - so I asked about the "Altium Lite" - and he said and I quote directly... "We may one day have a limited version, but forget that one, will only be a bit better than Eagle." bummer - they have not watched Dave's videos....

[Vasi]

... "We may one day have a limited version, but forget that one, will only be a bit better than Eagle." bummer - they have not watched Dave's videos....

That means, they will never offer something free like Eagle. The phrase is a prove that they watched Dave's videos. So guys, back to whatever we use for PCB design. For hobby, DipTrace is still the best option (it can use all KiCAD 3D components).

[DerekG]

I just had a "conversation" with a EU Altium representative - and he said and I quote directly... "We may one day have a limited version, but forget that one, will only be a bit better than Eagle." bummer - they have not watched Dave's videos....

So, Altium pulls the wool over the eyes of its shareholders once again!

[elektrinis]

What a nice coincidence. Just started a design with flex PCB and saw that AD14 is available and has a new feature for flex PCB. Usually I do this kind of work in SolidWorks and did not actually *need* the feature for my simple project, but decided to try it out. And what do you know...



Bugs bugs bugs... My whole PCB is flex without "rigid" areas and that prevented it from bending without any warning, simply ignored the bend line and did not do anything. So I have found a workaround - created an identical layer stack copy and set it to "fixed 3D". Now bending line shows actual bend width, however... When switched to 3D, all I get is garbage. Well OK, maybe there is an issue with my video card or drivers or config or whatever... But I am tied to this video card and driver version, because it is required for SolidWorks to run smooth.

[EEVblog]

they have not watched Dave's videos....

They most certainly have watched my video. They are just too *insert your favorite word here* to comprehend the opportunity available to them.

[IanJ]

they have not watched Dave's videos....

They most certainly have watched my video. They are just too *insert your favorite word here* to comprehend the opportunity available to them.

I gave up waiting on Altium and just upgraded my Eagle license.
Yup, how hard can it be to take Altium source code, knock off a few features/strip it down a bit/Limit it somehow...........and rebadge it the 'lite' version and watch the money roll in......................tw@ts!

Ian.

[EEVblog]

Yup, how hard can it be to take Altium source code, knock off a few features/strip it down a bit/Limit it somehow...........and rebadge it the 'lite' version and watch the money roll in

It's not hard at all, unless they are stupid enough to try and re-write it somehow...

[free_electron]

What a nice coincidence. Just started a design with flex PCB and saw that AD14 is available and has a new feature for flex PCB. Usually I do this kind of work in SolidWorks and did not actually *need* the feature for my simple project, but decided to try it out. And what do you know...



Bugs bugs bugs...

your board outline has an open contour. that is what is causing the artifact you are seeing.

i've done multiple flex projects so far. any time i had this problem it was an open contour or a wrongly defined bend radius.

[T3sl4co1l]

Funny, before AD14 you had a closed polygon outline and that's that.

I've noticed a few other packages have that, you can draw a free form outline, but you manually have to make it closed (hopefully it at least checks for you).

Tim

[jayk]

Along the lines of others in this thread... recently talked to a sales rep for Altium (not Altium employee) and he said he'd heard nothing about any 'lite' version of the product.  I mentioned it would be nice to have a schematic + PCB product only and he seemed to think that's where most of the development effort has been going anyway (as opposed to FPGA and simulation).

On a similar note, I just saw that Altium will be increasing the price to US $9245 (which I think includes one year of maintenance... they call it 'subscription').  Can't find the current price on their website, so not sure how much of an increase this is.

[theatrus]

Along the lines of others in this thread... recently talked to a sales rep for Altium (not Altium employee) and he said he'd heard nothing about any 'lite' version of the product.  I mentioned it would be nice to have a schematic + PCB product only and he seemed to think that's where most of the development effort has been going anyway (as opposed to FPGA and simulation).

On a similar note, I just saw that Altium will be increasing the price to US $9245 (which I think includes one year of maintenance... they call it 'subscription').  Can't find the current price on their website, so not sure how much of an increase this is.

Sounds like they are just bundling the mandatory $1750USD first year subscription into the price.

[arhi]

there was altium presentation here few weeks ago and from talking to altium trainer and altium salesman
 - altium want to offer "crippled" version but attm they still do not know how it will look like and how much it will cost
 - they expect huge "umpf" from the vault
 - they have number of ppl adding components to the vault
 - there is some "voting" system on altium cloud where customers vote for features and bugs and the priority of the features and bugs is determined from there only so what's first on the list is being worked on. this system is invisible to "non registered users" so I was not able to look at it, someone could check and report back
 - 14.0 is out with huge number of bugs and they know about it, the flex features are very very buggy and they know about it but decision was to better push out unfinished feature and then fix it with patches then not to push it out at all. 14.2.0 solves most of the known bugs, still some bugs exist but afaik "nothing serious"

not related to the this presentation but maybe interesting to the conversation about availability (I'm not suggesting anyone use illegal version of Altium)
 - until few days ago latest illegal version available was 14.1.5.30772
 - since few days ago 14.2.4 is available
 - compared with 13.x that comes with libraries, 14.x only comes with some fpga libs and few basic libs and that's it, not a single op-amp in all libraries that come with 14.x for example

if ($altium_noncommercial_price <=500$) & ($yearly_vault_components_subscription <=50$) & ($upgrade_to_minor_version = 0) & ($upgrade_to_major_version <=50$) & ($limitation_layers >= 2) & ($limitation_size >= A4) {$get_altium=1; $switch_to_altium=1;} else { $invest_in_kicad=1; $work_in_kicad=1; $work_in_eagle=1;}

I personally don't care about commercial licence, IMO $5k is ok for commercial licence or $50k or $500k .. whoever is using it commercially have brain to calculate what's good for him..

[n3wbie]

not related to the this presentation but maybe interesting to the conversation about availability (I'm not suggesting anyone use illegal version of Altium)
 - until few days ago latest illegal version available was 14.1.5.30772
 - since few days ago 14.2.4 is available
 - compared with 13.x that comes with libraries, 14.x only comes with some fpga libs and few basic libs and that's it, not a single op-amp in all libraries that come with 14.x for example

So what you're saying is that having the libraries in the cloud (meaning you have to have a valid subscription and license to access them) will help prevent piracy?

That's actually a great idea!