EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => Altium Designer => Topic started by: mrpackethead on October 17, 2018, 08:06:32 am
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If we all just said to Altium, from 2019, we are only going to pay $500 a seat for renewals, and enough of us did it, what coudl they do. I'm tired of being treated to buggy code.
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They would go to their best customers and offer them a deal (which they might already have done) and the rest would have to put up with it or migrate?
They have a service... You want it... You pay.
It seems that capitalism is increasingly confusing to people?
What you need is competition... Try diptrace.
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They would go to their best customers and offer them a deal (which they might already have done) and the rest would have to put up with it or migrate?
They have a service... You want it... You pay.
It seems that capitalism is increasingly confusing to people?
What you need is competition... Try diptrace.
Yes, i want somethign. And when i pay for it, i expect it to work. Version 18, is somethign like 2500 issues in bugcrunch. Seriously you want me to pay for that. ALtium need to understand that they need to supply somethign workable.
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So sit on the last release of version 14 or 16 or whatever and live with it?
Tim
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It seems that capitalism is increasingly confusing to people?
It is confusing if it does not work like in this case, they get paid for doing a lousy job and you seem to have no choice to accept it ?
Capitalism should be about competition and getting better products through innovation ;)
So indeed the only step left when a company is screwing you over, is to not pay anymore, switch to an older version or other product and sent a clear message.
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So sit on the last release of version 14 or 16 or whatever and live with it?
Tim
Problem is with some customers: it looks bad if you don't have/can't afford/don't want the latest-and-greatest.
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So sit on the last release of version 14 or 16 or whatever and live with it?
Tim
Problem is with some customers: it looks bad if you don't have/can't afford/don't want the latest-and-greatest.
I've never had customer that cared about what EDA tool i used was. I dont' sell schematics/pcbs. I sell products.
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Which is why I said "some". I sometimes do freelancing for larger companies. If the entire company is on Altium 18.1, they won't accept KiCad. Or Altium 17.0 for that matter.
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Which is why I said "some". I sometimes do freelancing for larger companies. If the entire company is on Altium 18.1, they won't accept KiCad. Or Altium 17.0 for that matter.
Why would anyone use 18.x with 2900 bugs?
Anyway are you in or out of the protest.
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Stick to Altium Designer 17.1.9. It's the latest stable version. All after that is a bugfest. :--
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Stick to Altium Designer 17.1.9. It's the latest stable version. All after that is a bugfest. :--
I'm still using 13.1.2 and Protel 98.
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Which is why I said "some". I sometimes do freelancing for larger companies. If the entire company is on Altium 18.1, they won't accept KiCad. Or Altium 17.0 for that matter.
Why would anyone use 18.x with 2900 bugs?
Anyway are you in or out of the protest.
Because it's the latest and greatest. It has a higher number. It must be better. :-DD
I have my own protest: I stopped paying my subscription earlier this year. I simply don't use it often enough to warrant the price. So my plan is to re-activate a few years down the road if needed/forced to. They will then slap me in the face with overdue subscription fees and I will laugh in their face at the 5k bill.
We will then argue, I will cry and be quite pathetic and they will give me the renewal for a fraction of the 5k. Which will be along the lines of the 500/year you mentioned.
Yeah. That's how it will go. It will be a beautiful, moving moment. Possibly there will be flowers and a rainbow.
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Solutions, in order idealness:
1 = no bugs, not going to happen.
2 = They continue to patch existing versions until they as bug free and stable as possible before releasing a new version with new features, so people have the option to buy that as a perpetual license and stick with it.
3 = They offer an opt-out clause at any time were once you find a stable version you are happy with you can exit (or pay fee to exit) and keep that exact version as a perpetual license.
They aren't going to do any of that though, it's in their vested interest to have everyone on subscription. Last I checked about half of the customer base were on subscription.
In theory it's possible to protest vote changes at Altium, and the best way to do that is to NOT be on subscription and let them know why.
A big thing in their yearly report to shareholders is how many people they have converted to over to subscription, and if that number start dropping instead of increasing, everyone takes notice.
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I have my own protest: I stopped paying my subscription earlier this year. I simply don't use it often enough to warrant the price. So my plan is to re-activate a few years down the road if needed/forced to. They will then slap me in the face with overdue subscription fees and I will laugh in their face at the 5k bill.
We will then argue, I will cry and be quite pathetic and they will give me the renewal for a fraction of the 5k. Which will be along the lines of the 500/year you mentioned.
Yeah. That's how it will go. It will be a beautiful, moving moment. Possibly there will be flowers and a rainbow.
As someone who worked there I can assure you that that's actually the thing they fear the most!
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I have my own protest: I stopped paying my subscription earlier this year. I simply don't use it often enough to warrant the price. So my plan is to re-activate a few years down the road if needed/forced to. They will then slap me in the face with overdue subscription fees and I will laugh in their face at the 5k bill.
We will then argue, I will cry and be quite pathetic and they will give me the renewal for a fraction of the 5k. Which will be along the lines of the 500/year you mentioned.
Yeah. That's how it will go. It will be a beautiful, moving moment. Possibly there will be flowers and a rainbow.
Haha, this is how I have pretty much always done it with them 8) Not to the extend of 5 years, but mostly 1.5 - 2.5 year periods.
Have been working for several companies as a contractor at a same time and I can see how they all get different subscription offers - from AU$900 to AU1800 per year (this is what makes me angry). Nothing different b/w the companies and all with 1-3 seats only.
I think the best is if alot of people do not renew their licenses, they will start dropping prices eventually. It would have been great if all had to renew at the same time, in which case a large community of users could realy put pressure on them, but as we all have our subscriptions at different times this is not that easy to achieve.
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I think the best is if alot of people do not renew their licenses, they will start dropping prices eventually.
I don't know, these companies can be so arrogant they will raise the prices for the existing users to compensate the loss of revenue, it would not suprise me a bit.
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My biggest problem with altium license fees is they keep spending it to develop new stuff that they then want to charge me thousands more to buy extra licenses for!!! like vaults and now the new 365 cloud thing and oh yeah,, there was that PDN plugin thing... all of this is paid for with subscription fees, and then they want to sell it to us again? then make us pay subscriptions on those things too? hmmm.
At the end of the day the main codebase being updated is good. they still add in new useful capabilities that make my job easier and me more effective - and I am prepared to pay for that. But when so much of their dev money seems to be going on stuff that then needs thousands and thousands of $ to buy on top of the base program, (then thousands more ongoing to keep up to date!) I start to wonder how long Altium will even be around for. And then I start to wonder if I should be looking for the next EDA already?
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yes...
Altium Bugcrunch is up to 2506 bugs now.....
Even if half of those are real, that's about 500 odd added in the past 12 months...
AD18 in my opinion is defective software. It was producing corrupted Gerbers for a while.... I think that meets the definition of defective software....AD17 was fine. They took away a bunch of features like key shortcuts, useful dialogs, ruined the color schemes and gave us a nearly unusable product.
Altium, just please fix the bugs. Altium forums are private behind username and password, if the world actually could read the forums they might consider another product,
Altium does not listen to its user base. I think they rely on adding new subscribers and don't care about the loss of old subscribers.
Altium please fix the bugs first. Until AD18, it was a great product.
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If I read that i think: where is the SW quality control?
Why did the automated tests and unit tests not fail ?
This is in SW terms a disaster in the making ;)
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What is Altium's plan to clean up the product ? AD 17.1.9 was OK ...AD18, is widely believed to be defective software.
1) Bug crunch is up to 2506 items. Even if 50% of those are real, that's alot of unanswered posts.
-Altium you are supposed to be taking note and interfacing with the users, not just letting BugCrunch count to infinity !.
2) Altium claims on their website they are putting on 6000 new users per year.
-Is the business strategy to ignore existing users, not fix the software not bother about the say, lost 1000 subs per year of disgruntled users ?
It reminds me of a business strategy used for Health Clubs and Gyms. Just keep adding members that never use the facilities, and never maintain the facilities..
I talk to the sales people who are sympathetic to my complaints but have no input or control it seems.
The biggest disagreement I hear privately among many is that Altium want to penalise / charge users for ignoring paying subs for AD18, which users consider is defective software. There is plenty of grounds for it being considered defective software- Look at the Gerber disaster !
I considered organising a boycott of paying subs and bringing in the ACCC, but if Altium's business strategy is just to bank on adding new users and ignoring the unhappy ones, I do not think not paying subs is going to work, it will be within their strategy. They won't care.
There are a couple of options :
1) You can try and do a deal with Altium to avoid paying for the defective AD18 release. That might work, depending on your history with the product., and how long you have been out of maintenance.
2) Just stay on AD 17.1.9 for 4 years which is about the time to re coup buying Altium from new in 4 or 5 years time. When it might be fixed.
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We terminated maintenance/subscription/extortion this year. After 10 years we've paid over $100k for a tool that's basically the same as it was at V6. Sure, a few bells-and-whistles were added that are useful, but all in all it's the same tool with many of the same bugs from 2006.
We're staying with V16.1.2 for now, but are paid up through V18. Not going to use V18, maybe V17 if it's any good ...
We're using that money, annually, to buy other software tools that bring us features and functionality that Altium can't seem to provide.
We're done paying to be alpha/beta customers for untested, buggy, and unreliable software.
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There is no way i'm going to pay them now for subscription for some software that was buggy. I'll make them an offer of US$1500 to update to v19, after a satisifactory period of evaluation.
Simply put, you cna't trust altium.
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2500 bugs is not all that unusual, I've worked on software products that had >10,000 open bugs. Of course many of these were so old they applied to features that were long ago removed or reworked and many were very minor but they were still bugs.
Easy solution here though is to just use something else. I refuse to rent software as a matter of principal and there is nothing that will ever make me reconsider. Fortunately KiCad is free and does the job.
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Someone else's money goes to someone else.
Why would I get involved? :-//
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Easy solution here though is to just use something else. I refuse to rent software as a matter of principal and there is nothing that will ever make me reconsider. Fortunately KiCad is free and does the job.
Something else. Kicad is not an option for doing serious work. Its just way too slow. I too dont' like the concept of renting software either, but altium does. well, they want to sell it to you and then rent it. The market for PCB design software is just too small.
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Someone else's money goes to someone else.
Why would I get involved? :-//
My money goes to someone else. Why would I get involved.
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AD18 in my opinion is defective software. ...They took away a bunch of features like key shortcuts
I did not see AD18 but this afternoon attended a AD19 webcast and they have key shortcuts there. Not sure if they brought them back or what.
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Easy solution here though is to just use something else. I refuse to rent software as a matter of principal and there is nothing that will ever make me reconsider. Fortunately KiCad is free and does the job.
Something else. Kicad is not an option for doing serious work. Its just way too slow. I too dont' like the concept of renting software either, but altium does. well, they want to sell it to you and then rent it. The market for PCB design software is just too small.
TIL your license runs out after one year
Tim
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keep that exact version as a perpetual license.
Well we all know there is nothing perpertual in Windows. My concern is my legacy Altium will stop working at some point because the newer Windows will not support it anymore.
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keep that exact version as a perpetual license.
Well we all know there is nothing perpertual in Windows. My concern is my legacy Altium will stop working at some point because the newer Windows will not support it anymore.
On the upside: if there's one thing you can count on, in the PC world, it is backwards compatibility. That's the one and only reason x86 has eaten the dust of almost every other ISA out there.
It may not be available out-of-the-box, day zero of a new OS, but it's very likely to be hacked together in at least partial working order, sooner or later.
Assuming VMs remain supported (seems likely, through the foreseeable future?), you can always run ancient Windows that way. You don't need to connect it to the internet. Or if you do, carefully firewall the VM, or don't save changes, just boot it fresh every time.
Not that a driver or wrapper or VM is necessarily the most convenient environment to start up or use, but that's the whole point, you're explicitly not paying to receive the latest version. Cost is cost, one way or another, whether it's plodding along with whatever tools you have or paying for the newest (and hopefully usable-est) tools.
On that note -- that KiCAD is usable at all at its price, is pretty remarkable. Complaining that it's "slower" seems to reflect more upon the "customer"'s quality, than the product! ;)
Tim
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Someone else's money goes to someone else.
Why would I get involved? :-//
My money goes to someone else. Why would I get involved.
Sorry to hear that. Or congrats on not having bosses.
I've hear that they have special pricing for startups and small companies. Ask for discount and you might just get it. They are more interested in selling you the subscription with discount than not selling it at all.
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The problem with running Altium in a VM is the modern graphics cards are not always supported by the virtualization software.you may need a particular model and that is pain in the ass. For instance my GTX1060 in Virtual Box VM on Win7 host only displays routing and not 3D or other modes such as different dialogs, etc. Altium runs fine on the same PC on the host but not in a VM.
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Something else. Kicad is not an option for doing serious work. Its just way too slow. I too dont' like the concept of renting software either, but altium does. well, they want to sell it to you and then rent it. The market for PCB design software is just too small.
I don't if it has all the features needed for "serious work" but slow? I haven't found it to be slow at all, at least not the older version I'm using. Even back when I was running it on an ancient Pentium-M laptop it was quite snappy. Have the latest versions slowed down by orders of magnitude?
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Something else. Kicad is not an option for doing serious work. Its just way too slow. I too dont' like the concept of renting software either, but altium does. well, they want to sell it to you and then rent it. The market for PCB design software is just too small.
I don't if it has all the features needed for "serious work" but slow? I haven't found it to be slow at all, at least not the older version I'm using. Even back when I was running it on an ancient Pentium-M laptop it was quite snappy. Have the latest versions slowed down by orders of magnitude?
Slow as in a slow workflow, as opposed to 'running' slow.
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Well there are other options. Orcad, Pads, Diptrace, probably some others. Also older versions of Altium.
I dunno what else to tell you, Altium costs what it costs, if it's too expensive or not up to the quality you need the only real option you have is to use something else.
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We just paid $800 to renew, haggled down from $1500.
....and now it crashes when I try to generate gerbers.
"Known problem. Try reinstalling an older version."
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We just paid $800 to renew, haggled down from $1500.
....and now it crashes when I try to generate gerbers.
"Known problem. Try reinstalling an older version."
is that v19 doing that?
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What is Altium's plan to clean up the product ? AD 17.1.9 was OK ...AD18, is widely believed to be defective software.
1) Bug crunch is up to 2506 items. Even if 50% of those are real, that's alot of unanswered posts.
-Altium you are supposed to be taking note and interfacing with the users, not just letting BugCrunch count to infinity !.
2) Altium claims on their website they are putting on 6000 new users per year.
-Is the business strategy to ignore existing users, not fix the software not bother about the say, lost 1000 subs per year of disgruntled users ?
It reminds me of a business strategy used for Health Clubs and Gyms. Just keep adding members that never use the facilities, and never maintain the facilities..
I talk to the sales people who are sympathetic to my complaints but have no input or control it seems.
The biggest disagreement I hear privately among many is that Altium want to penalise / charge users for ignoring paying subs for AD18, which users consider is defective software. There is plenty of grounds for it being considered defective software- Look at the Gerber disaster !
I considered organising a boycott of paying subs and bringing in the ACCC, but if Altium's business strategy is just to bank on adding new users and ignoring the unhappy ones, I do not think not paying subs is going to work, it will be within their strategy. They won't care.
There are a couple of options :
1) You can try and do a deal with Altium to avoid paying for the defective AD18 release. That might work, depending on your history with the product., and how long you have been out of maintenance.
2) Just stay on AD 17.1.9 for 4 years which is about the time to re coup buying Altium from new in 4 or 5 years time. When it might be fixed.
Yea - they threw their long time users under a bus in order to attract Allegro and Pads users.
Some recent posts I made on their forum follows. I used AD 6.9 for years. I'm sticking with AD 17 for now, tho I'm current with them.
Here's the posts - this was concerning the silly Properties panel that replaced modal dialog boxes:
>>>>>
Just bring back an option to use modal dialogs.
Allegro sucks because of property panels. If you are trying to court allegro users at large companies - good luck with that. They get full seats of Cadence PCB and schematic for free along with the IC design tools that cost millions.
You're throwing your long time users under a bus. Not cool... These are people that need to know that they are turning valid hardware. Changing a methodology to fit some newfangled GUI isn't like changing things in some software dev environment. We just can't backspace, backspace, correct. ourselves out of it.
Maybe it's due to Altium being run by marketing and software guys... you need to realize - we hardware guys get to hit compile once and wait to see if it works.
That's the key - real PCB's in our hands. Not pretty PDF's, or fancy 3D - boards that are in our hands. We and our clients aren't Lucasfilms - we don't make money on pretty pictures...
And make the layer stack table that you place on the artwork have selectable columns so I can get rid of thickness and constant. We're at 62 CAMHOLDs from various PCB fabs due to that.
And don't say "use Draughtsman" since our fabs don't even look at PDF's except for the purchase order.
And trying to have a materials thing in AD19 for PCB lamination. Really? Not one of our PCB fabs will follow that - esp on controlled impedance. They have tools they use and specific laminates and prepreg for stuff we need controlled. Having some PCB designer that's never in his life actually worked on a PCB fab line, let alone one specific to a certain PCB fabricators line dictate best practice for a PCB fabricator is silly at best - disastrous at worst.
And for non-stackup critical quick turns and small on-shore runs - which most of us are doing - it's fodder for more CAMHOLDS.
And 360? So you expect that all of our disparate vendors are going to rush out and get 360? Really? Tell you what - go visit a CM or fab during an ISO or AS9100 audit. See how that goes (they won't even let you in the door). Their documentation and workflow is well beyond a cursory thing Altium would provide.
Me thinks Altium needs to get all the employees to actually run multiple products thru from concept to delivery. Deal with purchasing. Deal with bid processes. Deal with clients. Deal with fabricators. Deal with CM's. Deal with things like DFARS requirements Deal with ITAR Deal with counterfeit parts mitigation You will see real quick what's important and what's fluff or in most cases useless.
Reality - it sucks...
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So someone mentions that the workspace stays live with the Prop panel vs. modal dialogs of old:
>>>>
Yea - but I used the inspector, PCB panel, and PCB/SCH/Lib LIsts for stuff like that. There's times when I just want to quickly change a property. Simple double click, open a modal and move on.
I still don't see why they did this with some panel flailing away with every thing I do. Really distracting. I still think it was to woo the allegro crowd.
When I saw the dims in the PCB lib thing it sort of confirmed that to me. IF I have a super critical footprint I need to make, I use a real 3D tool and bring in a 2D view with "L" shaped sketch elements that I can lock pads and such to. (NOTE - Dennis - got the patent pending on that...)
What would be nice would be various object snaps like center, intersection, etc... Even Soildworks (not a misspell) had to add OSNAPS back in 2004 I think.
I always thought it odd that I can draw a 1:50 residential site plan CAD drawing more accurately than a PCB. Ya know - that's what Altium should be concerned with... real improvements. So many others like that...
Here's one example - Imagine being able to use a command like thing to draw an exact trace or line length and width. Or maybe one driven by dims...
Back in 1995 when I first got Soiledworks the one thing that was different was that you sketched rough and drove the the sketch with dims. In Acad, you'd place and draw geometry and the dims were driven by that.
There's times when both are nice to have. There's times when I really prefer Soildworks way of doing it - I use that a lot for doing footprints and rec'd layout for hi-output LED's - BTW - there's a real lacking of support in most EDA tools for the way Nichia, Luxeon, etc... want those to be done. I've done well ove a few hundred different designs for a guy here in DC that does a lot of that. Weird is that before I got "assigned" him by one of my CAD guys, I did a ring light for this thing:
https://youtu.be/V75m79nsBTM?t=203 (https://youtu.be/V75m79nsBTM?t=203)
You'll see the thing light up in the demo for Obama...
Back in the day I did a 40 mile to scale 3D site plan of a tower farm- no mouse or digitizer
http://ajawamnet.com/ajawam4/trans.dwg (http://ajawamnet.com/ajawam4/trans.dwg)
All command line and cursor keys, on a DOS machine running ACAD 10 I think.
Having more flexibility in creating geometry would be a lot nicer than some silly bells and whistles and chasing marketturds...
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altium licences are 'version'-less. if you buy a license now that licence is valid for ALL versions up till the one that was in effect at the time you buy the license.
so if you buy today you can run 19,18,17,16,15,14 and all older versions down to probably 99se ....
latest 18.xx is stable.
19 has some quircks but is largely stable.
modal dialogs suck ! the panels are much faster to work with. you can drag them off screen to a second or third monitor and leave them there. focus hops over automatically.
Many people are complaining about things that are actually caused by either
- unfamiliarity with the tool
- wanting to shoehorn their own way of working ( coming from a different cad program and expecting it to work the same )
- not having a proper setup
let me elaborate a bit on the latter:
- do NOT run Altium in a VM.
- do not run altium on a MAC ( even with windows installed ) or any other host os. the problem is support for graphics cards
- have a proper graphics card with its own memory ( none of that intel shared memory crud )
- nvidia works best. ATI sometimes has artifacting. hi end game cards work well as long as they have proper openGL2.xx drivers.
- want to have a real stable system : invest in a quadro board.
I run Altium day-in day-out with very heavy workloads and rarely experience the thing crashing. But i do have a proper machine to run it.
A lot of problems are caused by the machine it runs on.
I typically have 17 and 18 open at the same time , parallel with either Solidworks or Catia , Outlook and Chrome as a browser , MS Access or excel
I have a 3dconnexion CAD mouse and space navigator.
My hardware is a 4 year old HP Zbook17 Gen 3 plugged into an advanced docking station ( to get more displayports and usb ports)
- windows 7 64 bit
- 32 gig ram
- Quadro 3100 GPU
- three 30 inch 2460x1600 screens (HP Z30)
you can frequently find such machines on ebay in the 600 to 900$ range. These are real beasts designed to run heavy CAD like Catia , and are essentially portable workstations. They have plenty of room inside for two harddisks, an EMMC module, so you can soup this thing up. the dock has room for an additional hardisk plus an optical drive.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ZBook-17-G2-Intel-Core-i7-4810MQ-NVIDIA-Quadro-K3100M-16GB-FHD-256GB-SSD-Cam/163464238273?hash=item260f3a54c1:g:fC8AAOSw2hxcEpek:rk:1:pf:0 (https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ZBook-17-G2-Intel-Core-i7-4810MQ-NVIDIA-Quadro-K3100M-16GB-FHD-256GB-SSD-Cam/163464238273?hash=item260f3a54c1:g:fC8AAOSw2hxcEpek:rk:1:pf:0)
the above is a near identical machine as mine ( mine actually has a slighly lower cpu , but more ram. )
the advanced dock is like 25 $ ...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Advanced-Docking-Station-USB-3-0-2170p-8440p-8460p-8470p-8470w-8540w-8560p/302383358450?epid=2255299248&hash=item466773e1f2:g:0RkAAOSwjyxZcmNY:sc:USPSPriority (https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Advanced-Docking-Station-USB-3-0-2170p-8440p-8460p-8470p-8470w-8540w-8560p/302383358450?epid=2255299248&hash=item466773e1f2:g:0RkAAOSwjyxZcmNY:sc:USPSPriority)!95120!US!-1:rk:2:pf:0
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Someone else's money goes to someone else.
Why would I get involved? :-//
My money goes to someone else. Why would I get involved.
Sorry to hear that. Or congrats on not having bosses.
I've hear that they have special pricing for startups and small companies. Ask for discount and you might just get it. They are more interested in selling you the subscription with discount than not selling it at all.
Their special pricing for start ups is pretty funny. It is basically their year end deal ("name your price and we will see"). It is still pretty expensive (I think the last start up, I got it for $4k + subscription).
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Easy solution here though is to just use something else. I refuse to rent software as a matter of principal and there is nothing that will ever make me reconsider. Fortunately KiCad is free and does the job.
Something else. Kicad is not an option for doing serious work. Its just way too slow. I too dont' like the concept of renting software either, but altium does. well, they want to sell it to you and then rent it. The market for PCB design software is just too small.
KiCad is slow? That is news to me. Although, I have not used it in 2 years, but the last version i used was pretty dam good for free.
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altium licences are 'version'-less. if you buy a license now that licence is valid for ALL versions up till the one that was in effect at the time you buy the license.
so if you buy today you can run 19,18,17,16,15,14 and all older versions down to probably 99se ....
latest 18.xx is stable.
19 has some quircks but is largely stable.
modal dialogs suck ! the panels are much faster to work with. you can drag them off screen to a second or third monitor and leave them there. focus hops over automatically.
Many people are complaining about things that are actually caused by either
- unfamiliarity with the tool
- wanting to shoehorn their own way of working ( coming from a different cad program and expecting it to work the same )
- not having a proper setup
let me elaborate a bit on the latter:
- do NOT run Altium in a VM.
- do not run altium on a MAC ( even with windows installed ) or any other host os. the problem is support for graphics cards
- have a proper graphics card with its own memory ( none of that intel shared memory crud )
- nvidia works best. ATI sometimes has artifacting. hi end game cards work well as long as they have proper openGL2.xx drivers.
- want to have a real stable system : invest in a quadro board.
I run Altium day-in day-out with very heavy workloads and rarely experience the thing crashing. But i do have a proper machine to run it.
A lot of problems are caused by the machine it runs on.
I typically have 17 and 18 open at the same time , parallel with either Solidworks or Catia , Outlook and Chrome as a browser , MS Access or excel
I have a 3dconnexion CAD mouse and space navigator.
My hardware is a 4 year old HP Zbook17 Gen 3 plugged into an advanced docking station ( to get more displayports and usb ports)
- windows 7 64 bit
- 32 gig ram
- Quadro 3100 GPU
- three 30 inch 2460x1600 screens (HP Z30)
you can frequently find such machines on ebay in the 600 to 900$ range. These are real beasts designed to run heavy CAD like Catia , and are essentially portable workstations. They have plenty of room inside for two harddisks, an EMMC module, so you can soup this thing up. the dock has room for an additional hardisk plus an optical drive.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ZBook-17-G2-Intel-Core-i7-4810MQ-NVIDIA-Quadro-K3100M-16GB-FHD-256GB-SSD-Cam/163464238273?hash=item260f3a54c1:g:fC8AAOSw2hxcEpek:rk:1:pf:0 (https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ZBook-17-G2-Intel-Core-i7-4810MQ-NVIDIA-Quadro-K3100M-16GB-FHD-256GB-SSD-Cam/163464238273?hash=item260f3a54c1:g:fC8AAOSw2hxcEpek:rk:1:pf:0)
the above is a near identical machine as mine ( mine actually has a slighly lower cpu , but more ram. )
the advanced dock is like 25 $ ...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Advanced-Docking-Station-USB-3-0-2170p-8440p-8460p-8470p-8470w-8540w-8560p/302383358450?epid=2255299248&hash=item466773e1f2:g:0RkAAOSwjyxZcmNY:sc:USPSPriority (https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Advanced-Docking-Station-USB-3-0-2170p-8440p-8460p-8470p-8470w-8540w-8560p/302383358450?epid=2255299248&hash=item466773e1f2:g:0RkAAOSwjyxZcmNY:sc:USPSPriority)!95120!US!-1:rk:2:pf:0
I have to agree. People who complain are people who came from another CAD package, which is understandable. I am sure that if I went to PADS, I would be complaining everyday as well.
I run on an X1 carbon, it works fine for the most part.
If there is something I hate about Altium, I just remind myself of what it was like with Eagle or the first generations of KiCad.
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Because KiCad was mentioned a few times. I wonder when the break even point comes where companies decide to use KiCad and pay developers to implement missing features, instead of using the commercial alternatives. Like it happened with Blender.
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Because KiCad was mentioned a few times. I wonder when the break even point comes where companies decide to use KiCad and pay developers to implement missing features, instead of using the commercial alternatives. Like it happened with Blender.
Cern has been a major contributor to KiCad. But for most part, they are not getting paid.
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Because KiCad was mentioned a few times. I wonder when the break even point comes where companies decide to use KiCad and pay developers to implement missing features, instead of using the commercial alternatives. Like it happened with Blender.
I have a few thousand hour experience in Altium. I work a lot faster in it, than anything else*. I guess KiCAD you can learn KiCAD in, say 500 hours. So it will be worth it when you have engineers at 10 EUR/hour.
*And that is just partly the experience, mostly it is just due to the more efficient software.
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Does Kicad still maintain hard references to your PCB library in your board designs? Not being able to control how and when changes to your PCB library are reflected in an existing design is a pretty big issue.
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Does Kicad still maintain hard references to your PCB library in your board designs? Not being able to control how and when changes to your PCB library are reflected in an existing design is a pretty big issue.
Sounds like an issue which was resolved in 2012 with the new board file format. Footprints are embedded in the board-file and need to be explicitly updated when someone want's to apply library changes.
The schematic file format will be ported with v6 as well, to no longer consist of two files (the second one caches the symbols used).
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Does Kicad still maintain hard references to your PCB library in your board designs? Not being able to control how and when changes to your PCB library are reflected in an existing design is a pretty big issue.
Sounds like an issue which was resolved in 2012 with the new board file format. Footprints are embedded in the board-file and need to be explicitly updated when someone want's to apply library changes.
The schematic file format will be ported with v6 as well, to no longer consist of two files (the second one caches the symbols used).
last I saw (the version previous to this new one), you have to manually tell it to not reference your original library after you are done with the project. Once you do that, it creates it's own library specific to that project.