now that my hopes for Altium hobbyist edition have been dashed, now what?

[snoopy]

My vote go to a release Protel 99 as freeware or  1-200 $.

That would likely ruin the company.
Deep down i think they know that 99SE is probably 99% of what most of their current customers need in a PCB/SCH tool.
And releasing that for free would likely be very bad for business.
They be much better off releasing a crippled/cheap version of their latest and greatest, at least that way they can better temp people into the higher end/higher priced package.

Too bad they made CircuitMaker 2000 disappear. That was a decent package, and a really nice simulator to boot.

Dave.

Altium shot themselves in the foot when they released Protel99SE because they made it to damned good for the time. It even runs rings around alot of low end offerings that are available today. At the end of the day you are just interested in the copper pattern and drill holes that defines a pcb and 99SE does a good job of going from schematic to PCB without to many hassles. Somehow there are a lot of people that could not justify using Altium for a simple two layer board design which incidiently may end up being a mass produced item. In this case 99SE is more than adequate for the job and quite often I see many  ebay audio designs done using 99SE. Somehow lots of bells and whistles doesn't always translate into productivity !

Having said that I believe Altium is the future and if Altium designer can match pads pcb in its manual routing capability then Altium will truly have won the race. For example I tried to do some of these things in Altium and it seemed crippled even though their advertising blurb says otherwise !!

regards
david

[free_electron]

altium has had that interactive push n shove since protel 98 ... pads only has had it in the last 2 or 3 years ...
shift-R to cycle through the modes...
mia drag. same story

M -D anc lcik on via. the traces will follow.
same for pushing unlocked objects out of the way. sits under system-preferences- interactive routing.

the only thing they don't have is cutting the tracks ( plow -trhrough ). but that is boneheaded anyway. if you need to cut that many tracks : change layer.

something that altium does have , that i have not seen in other packages : multitrack routing.
S - L ( Select touching line ) draw a line through the electrical connections you want t e grab.
then invoke the trace multiroute. you are putting all traces in parallel... if you have autocomplete on ... you know what i mean.

[snoopy]

altium has had that interactive push n shove since protel 98 ... pads only has had it in the last 2 or 3 years ...
shift-R to cycle through the modes...
mia drag. same story

M -D anc lcik on via. the traces will follow.
same for pushing unlocked objects out of the way. sits under system-preferences- interactive routing.

the only thing they don't have is cutting the tracks ( plow -trhrough ). but that is boneheaded anyway. if you need to cut that many tracks : change layer.

something that altium does have , that i have not seen in other packages : multitrack routing.
S - L ( Select touching line ) draw a line through the electrical connections you want t e grab.
then invoke the trace multiroute. you are putting all traces in parallel... if you have autocomplete on ... you know what i mean.

Yes I know that but it never has been able to push vias or jump tracks over vias so is limited for that reason. Try and do what is done in that pads video and I bet you can't !! Altium claims it can move vias out of the way but when I tried it, it was a bit lame. But I will have another go at it because ultimately that is the package I want to migrate to.

Also when you move or rotate components Altium won't automatically reroute and reconnect tracks like pads does. You just end up with a whole lot of violations and you have to clean up the mess yourself. I have a friend who changed from protel to pads because of these features. He said he would spend all day re-editing a board in protel when in pads it was a 10 minute job.

Altium needs to focus on the power user aspects of pcb design instead of getting sidetracked with all of this fpga crap. Sure they have added some great features like bus routing but they should fix up the fundamental issues that consume users time !!

regards
davo

[free_electron]

Yes I know that but it never has been able to push vias

Push via works. ( altium Designer 10 bult 810 )

Also when you move or rotate components

it will under certain conditions. but it don't quite work right if you move a large distance and lots ofstuff is in the way. Anyway , you place parts first, then route...

protel to pads

you cannot ask a 12 year old tool like protel to do things that pads latest-greatest can do. Get Altium 12 ( current build) and it will provide.

And eh.. any idea what a pads licence runs these days ? you can outfit 3 designers will full blown altium for the cost of a single seater pads..

[snoopy]

Yes I know that but it never has been able to push vias

Push via works. ( altium Designer 10 bult 810 )

Also when you move or rotate components

it will under certain conditions. but it don't quite work right if you move a large distance and lots ofstuff is in the way. Anyway , you place parts first, then route...

protel to pads

you cannot ask a 12 year old tool like protel to do things that pads latest-greatest can do. Get Altium 12 ( current build) and it will provide.

And eh.. any idea what a pads licence runs these days ? you can outfit 3 designers will full blown altium for the cost of a single seater pads..

are you talking about dragging components and the tracks ? The problem with that is that the tracks aren't tidied up after you drag the component and you can be left with lots of design rule violations so you spend lots of time rerouting tracks to the component. It would be good if it could automatically do a reroute and cleanup pass I notice this is also a problem with push and shove.

regards
davo

[gerrysweeney]

Diptrace is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.  I wrote this http://gerrysweeney.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-schematic-and-pcb-software/ about it having used it recently. AutoTRAX http://kov.com/ is another possible option for the hobby small user but it has its own problems





 

[hlavac]

I went through all of that so I can relate.

Tried Kicad - it was corrupting some components in schematic when saved, i think diodes.

Even bought AutoTRAX, not that it would be usable for me, but to fund its further development as a competitor to Eagle, but then he started doing it in .NET with the Microsoft's silly toolbar interface and it got unusably slow so I gave up on that one.

Used Diptrace for quite a while but it was a bit too simplistic and in fact as limited as the free Eagle, just in a bit different way. And my libraries got corrupted a few times, I just didn't have the confidence in it not losing my work. Ditched.

Ended up buying the (pretty expensive dammit) hobbyist version of Eagle 6.0. It has everything I was missing (internal component connections, yay! Finally I can do a proper tact switch and route thru it). Size limit sucks, but 16x10cm is better than the 10x8 of the freeware edition. I do my boards myself and big ones are harder to do, so it is kind of tolerable.
It's a bit nonintuitive in the start (like moving a group of parts - ctrl-rightclick? omfg you got to be kidding). Not that it's the weirdest of interfaces - have you seen LTSpice?
But in the end I found everithing I was looking for, even the stuff I thought was not there, so I kind of like it... yes the licensing policy sucks big time I have to agree with Dave on this one. And the local european distibutors are a ripoff, the prices are twice as high as in the US But the US branch will not sell to me directly...

[zappaMan]

Just to add some info to this thread.  I just requested information on an academic license and was informed that the pricing for 1 year is now $480CAD!  I'm a grad student (Power electronics) in Canada and just astounded at this price.  As someone who has used Autodesk Inventor and Solidworks I am blown away.  Both these products are virtually free for students (so we come experienced when we graduate) and don't expire even after we leave (they just put an academic notice on any output).  I guess Altium doesn't have enough competition in the market to encourage them to do such things.

[joelby]

That's pants, I just renewed my student license through the Australian office for about $120. You could always try asking them instead of the North American office!

[EEVblog]

I guess Altium doesn't have enough competition in the market to encourage them to do such things.

The lack of serious competition in their price/performance bracket is the reason why Altium still exist after doing almost everything possible to piss of their core loyal customer base, and work on everything but core PCB/SCH functionality over the last decade+
Why be content to be the worlds best PCB/SCH tool, when you can be so much more? 

Dave.

[hlavac]

I guess they would rather like to be the world's most expensive tool.

[EEVblog]

I guess they would rather like to be the world's most expensive tool.

I remember when the package hit $12K+, not long after I started there.
Then they slashed prices by 3/4 back to $3K or something.
At the time they said they were burning their bridges and could never go back to being a high priced tool.
Just another wild idea in the marketing mindset cycle they seem to need to go through every year...

Dave.

[dfnr2]

Wow, prices have been inching up.  As a small (1-man) business, when they dropped the price to $3995 with a year subscription in 2009, it was an easy decision to buy it.  Even the $1500 annual subscription is not an issue for me, but now that they're inching to the $7K mark for the same package, it's crossed the line for probably a large segment of the market.  Other mid-range packages like pulsonix and even PADS playing in the same price range have lower cost a la carte options that may lure many otherwise sure-thing Altium customers.  And, say what one will about Eagle, it is quite capable of making real-world boards, and if the recent internal changes lead to hierarchical structure capability, along with the new XML storage format accessible by external programs, it has potential to be a serious tool. 

I thought Altium had a great idea with the sub-5K price point, and yearly subscription model.  Why bump up the barrier of entry to potential subscribers?

And that's not even considering the possibilites of offering a more limited version (perhaps without dblibs, vaults, release management; perhaps even limited layers or pin counts) for the lower-end market.