Is Altium total crap or what?

[TSR]

Dear All,

Just so you know, I'm venting. The alternative is throwing something at my screen, but that gets expensive.

So, here we go....

I've been using Altium for going on 9 years and while it has an easier interface than Cadence or (de)Mentor, it has so many bugs, year after year after year after year, that it makes me puke.

Here's my latest discovery (see screen shot below): When routing a trace some genius at Altium decided that it was OK to place the trace off-grid. Not by something visible, say half a mil, but by some infinitesimal amount (in this case 1/1000 of a mil) so that you can't see it, but it won't fit, or shift itself, between two other traces that have the proper clearance to let it through.

So my question is: WHO IS THE FUCKING MORON AT ALTIUM WHO PROGRAMMED THIS SHIT?!?

Honestly. I understand that software "engineers" are not particularly gifted people. They chose software because hardware is hard and they simply didn't have the brains for it. So they start work for places like Altium or Microsoft and they have no idea that their sub-standard IQ results in hours upon hours of totally wasted time by others who take their jobs seriously.

I would estimate that in the past 9 years I have spent no less that 500 man-hours chasing down and going around idiotic Altium bugs (for this one I have to manually move the trace 1/1000 mil over so it's on-grid and fits between the other two traces that are also on-grid). Take my experience and multiply it by the hundreds of people using this crap software and you have some serious wasted time, money, nerves, etc. All because some little twit at Altium didn't bother to do the job right.

If we extrapolate to all software we're talking about billions, yes billions, of wasted man-hours spent fixing some little idiot's mistake. This is literally hundreds of billions of wasted dollars, but strangely not a single article about it in the WSJ, NYT, etc.

Now I'm sure there are real software engineers out there, people who earned the title "engineer", people who do the job right, people who also pull their hair out chasing down and fixing the idiocies of their co-workers - but you know what, they are a minority in their field. For the most part programmers are fucking morons. Morons who cost the rest of us a lot of money and a lot of time .... including that wasted on this post.

Ok, there, all better. Thank you EEVblog for the free therapy.

....now back to Altium....

[voltsandjolts]

Yeh, but sometimes it's better to stick with the devil you know.

[nigelwright7557]

PCB CAD software can be highly complex.
At the end of routing a pcb then DRC must be done to to make sure nothing is wrong.

Have you been in touch with Altium ?
Some software vendors go out of their way to help.

[Shonky]

Annoying but at least you're perfect.

[Psi]

Altium is not perfect, it's just the best we have.

Maybe one day the developers of one of the free PCB design packages will wake up and realize the truth.....

That instead of building their free PCB design package with a custom mouse/kbd interface with custom hotkeys and custom UI, they should instead be exactly duplicating how Altium's works, so every Altium user can use their PCB design software without having to unlearn and relearn everything.

That will be a good day. but that day is not today.

[blackdog]

Hi,


TSR i feel your pain...
Not about Altium but software in measurement instruments and there conctrol software, even from wel known companies you wil find al lot of horror.

Last week i returnd a Rigol DP2000 Power supply, lot of firmware bugs, webinterface the password Rigol Germany don't know!!!
Horirble fonts on the display of this power supply.

I asked Rigol some questions about the bad interface, bad firmware upgrade making a 2000 series power supply into a 900 series, how do you make it up!
Testing, are you crazy, you let the user do that nicely, which seems to be a modern revenue model.

Rigol DC Load,
Outputs on the back of the device generate if you connect a device to it that is not connected to ground, so this has clearly not been tested!
Like a battery scoop.

When programming the duty cycle of this DC Load you cannot adjust that in percent, then you may start calculating that in time and then switch again to the duty cycle modes to see if your duty cycle at say 750Hz has the 73 percent needed for your measurement setup.
Again, this has not been tested by the software tinkerers.

And then we have the software you use to control many measuring instruments from Keysight, brrrr.

So yes i feel your pain! 

Kind regards,
Bram

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[Veteran68]

Honestly. I understand that software "engineers" are not particularly gifted people. They chose software because hardware is hard and they simply didn't have the brains for it. So they start work for places like Altium or Microsoft and they have no idea that their sub-standard IQ results in hours upon hours of totally wasted time by others who take their jobs seriously.

I'll give you some grace here since you're in rant mode, but I've worked on both the software and hardwire side of things and have run into my share of idiots in both, and geniuses in both. Especially on the BUSINESS side of software, where sub-standard product is almost always the result of rushed project timelines and seldom one of engineer competence.

I chose the software path but I have a nearly-as-strong affinity for hardware. My professional career started as an embedded systems engineer writing firmware for hardware that I also participated in designing/tweaking/tuning. I chose the software field because I like it more, not because I "simply didn't have the brains" for hardware. To be quite honest, I'm pretty sure that I've been far more financially rewarded from software than hardware, as there are far more lucrative opportunities.

These days I run the Enterprise Architecture practice of a large corporation, and my hobby now trends more towards hardware than software, but I still have a love for software engineering. To each their own, so don't be a hardware snob.

[asmi]

Not by something visible, say half a mil, but by some infinitesimal amount (in this case 1/1000 of a mil) so that you can't see it, but it won't fit, or shift itself, between two other traces that have the proper clearance to let it through.

That is a punishment to you for using obsolete units which were invented by people who married their cousins (C) 

[TSR]

It's much nicer to work with integer dimensions (say 15 mil between parts, 6 mil traces, 10 mil clearances) than fractions of a millimeter (0.38 between parts, 0.15 traces, 0.25 clearances).

But hey, as a lowly American who am I to question the wisdom from that engineering powerhouse to the north.

[asmi]

It's much nicer to work with integer dimensions (say 15 mil between parts, 6 mil traces, 10 mil clearances) than fractions of a millimeter (0.38 between parts, 0.15 traces, 0.25 clearances).

Apparently not as nice as you think, especially since manufacturing has long transitioned to metric, so all those nice round numbers are turned into fractions of milimeter. Oh, and then there are microns too, which is where the industry is heading, so before long you will have your nice integer numbers...in microns

But hey, as a lowly American who am I to question the wisdom from that engineering powerhouse to the north.

Yeah, but not to worry, because stone age down south is almost over, infact all those imperial units have been legally defined through metric quite a while ago.
For those who didn't my reference:

[TimFox]

"Imperial" units are what used to be used in Canada.
The imperial gallon was larger than the US gallon.
"Customary" units are what are used now in the US, along with metric units.
The US went metric in 1959, but didn't tell anyone.

[Lyndsay_Doyle]

I agree with you.
I am totally fed up with it.
I could rant too about the stupid things it does and has done to me, but I won't I will be on here for hours.
I wish I never bought it.

[Doctorandus_P]

Did you know that in banana units a "tenth" is smaller then a "thou".

And I almost fell of my chair when I learned that drills can be sized in fractional bananas, decimal bananas, or some numbered table.

I also once imported one of the Nucleus boards (made in Altium, from ST's website) into KiCad, and the pads were "off". Especially with a 0.5mm pitch QFN or QFP (Can't remember) the pads were at noticeable irregular intervals. KiCad has a native resolution of nanometers (32 bit integers, so max theoretical PCB size is 4 by 4 meter). It's quite easy to replace those with native footprints in KiCad, but doing that and manually putting the tracks right easily wastes an extra half an hour during the conversion.

It's also annoying when ordering connectors. Some screw terminal blocks (the green Phoenix for example) can be ordered in a pitch of either 5mm or 5.08mm. Up to about 2 or 4 pins it does not matter much, but with a 12 pin connector the difference is big enough that it just won't fit at all.

Other annoying things is that they have some kind of table (yet again) just to look up what the cross section of a piece of electrical wire is.
They put grains of sand along a banana and count them tho determine the grid for a piece of sandpaper. Why not just state the average size of a grain in a comprehensible SI unit?

Also when I want to buy some yarn, fishing line or electrical wiring on Aliexpress the units are stated quite often in some incomprehensible banana units.

It's about time to implement the Metric Act of 1866 (aka as "Kasson Act"):
https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/metric-si/metric-policy

It really is completely Bananas.

[DonKu]

That is a punishment to you for using obsolete units which were invented by people who married their cousins (C) 

Your masters, the City of London cousinhood?

[TimFox]

Yes, a "tenth" is 1/10 of a "thou" that can be called a "mil".
I have three sets of drills:  number, fraction, and letter.
The number and letter sets are exponential, just like resistor values, and get me close to any inch or metric size from 0.040 inch up to 0.500 inch, so I haven't bought a set of metric drills.
Similarly, English, French, and German all have irregular verbs:  one learns to live with such difficulties.
(Z = 0.413000 inch, 27/64 = 0.421875 inch, continuing with fractions up to 1/2 = 0.500 inch.)

As I have stated elsewhere, I was once confused in the UK when the local engineer asked me if "4 mil" wire sufficed for a power cable.
I assumed he meant "4 mm diameter", but he actually meant "4 mm² area", which is quite different.

[tszaboo]

It's much nicer to work with integer dimensions (say 15 mil between parts, 6 mil traces, 10 mil clearances) than fractions of a millimeter (0.38 between parts, 0.15 traces, 0.25 clearances).

But hey, as a lowly American who am I to question the wisdom from that engineering powerhouse to the north.

Sure, because instead of 0.4mm or 0.5mm or 0.65mm pitch for an IC, you can count with 15.74, 19.68 and 25.59 mil and placing 0402 components on a nice 0.5mm grid you can do whatever you do now.
Also every standard defines clearance and creepage distances in mm, but whatever. You can just convert everything, it's clearly better.

[Doctorandus_P]

That 0402, is that metric, imperial or banana units?

Note: 0201 metric is quite small...

[nctnico]

It's much nicer to work with integer dimensions (say 15 mil between parts, 6 mil traces, 10 mil clearances) than fractions of a millimeter (0.38 between parts, 0.15 traces, 0.25 clearances).

Well, there is also a thing like micro-millimeters (micron or um) which give you a nice integer measue for distance. 0.38 mm = 380 microns. With ever decreasing trace widths, integer mils are not very suitable as a unit while metric just scales along. Some of my design have traces that are 92um wide. That is 2.34 mil. Not 2 mil and not 3 mil as these values would way off.

[TimFox]

There are also "microinches" in English-language usage, commonly used to specify surface finish.
Personally, and convenient in SI units with the standard prefixes, I try to do practical measurements using units where the numerical result is between 10 and 10,000.
E.g., 15 nF rather than 0.015 uF, 1500 pF rather than 1.5 nF.
This is a matter of personal choice.

[asmi]

Personally, and convenient in SI units with the standard prefixes, I try to do practical measurements using units where the numerical result is between 10 and 10,000.
E.g., 15 nF rather than 0.015 uF, 1500 pF rather than 1.5 nF.
This is a matter of personal choice.

Most schematics I've seen tend to use 0.1..99 range for caps, for example 0.1 uF instead of 100 nF, but 33 nF instead of 0.033 uF, but for resistors I typically see a 1..999 range, so a 100 Ohm is shown as 100, but 2200 Ohm as 2.2K, the latter range is also not uncommon for caps as well. I also found that even different schematics from the same company can have different ranges, so there don't seem to be any standardization.

[Veteran68]

I may be in the minority but I'm one American who prefers to work in metric. Being exposed to the metric system both in my military and scientific/engineering endeavors taught me the value of working and communicating in a base 10 system. I long for the day when we finally get over our obsession with non-intuitive units of measure. I've gotten pretty good at mentally converting between SAE/Imperial units and metric. And I probably have as many if not more metric measuring devices around the house and shop as I do SAE. So I for one welcome our metric overlords!

[TimFox]

Personally, and convenient in SI units with the standard prefixes, I try to do practical measurements using units where the numerical result is between 10 and 10,000.
E.g., 15 nF rather than 0.015 uF, 1500 pF rather than 1.5 nF.
This is a matter of personal choice.

Most schematics I've seen tend to use 0.1..99 range for caps, for example 0.1 uF instead of 100 nF, but 33 nF instead of 0.033 uF, but for resistors I typically see a 1..999 range, so a 100 Ohm is shown as 100, but 2200 Ohm as 2.2K, the latter range is also not uncommon for caps as well. I also found that even different schematics from the same company can have different ranges, so there don't seem to be any standardization.

There was an old convention (especially in the tube days) for non-polarized capacitors that values > 1 were in pF, values < 1 were in uF.  Polarized capacitor values were in uF.
All of the above unless otherwise specified.
This was before nF were popular.

[TimFox]

I may be in the minority but I'm one American who prefers to work in metric. Being exposed to the metric system both in my military and scientific/engineering endeavors taught me the value of working and communicating in a base 10 system. I long for the day when we finally get over our obsession with non-intuitive units of measure. I've gotten pretty good at mentally converting between SAE/Imperial units and metric. And I probably have as many if not more metric measuring devices around the house and shop as I do SAE. So I for one welcome our metric overlords!

Customary binary-fraction inches are intuitive for some purposes, such as carpentry.
Base 10 works fine, but gets cumbersome for binary fractions such as 1/64.
Base 10 is good for micrometers, calipers, and height gauges, and mine all have decimal inches.
I have no problem with metric:  I own a 305 mm Crescent wrench, and my cameras have a tripod thread that is M6.35.
Someday, someone can tell me what my metric shoe size of 45 means:  I know what my customary size of 11 means, but it is complicated to explain to those who don't know what a "barleycorn" means in this context.

[Feynman]

There is a special place in hell for engineers still working with imperial units. And until the devil gets you, you are - rightly so - tormented with software bugs, because the native units of the tool need conversion to imperial somehow

Well, seriously... I guess almost every ECAD tool has some bugs like that. But a good tool has a company behind it that takes bug reports seriously and tries to fix them ASAP. I'm glad - when we had the choice between Altium and Pulsonix -  we chose the latter. I don't think Pulsonix is the better tool overall. And it has its own fair share of bugs and weaknesses. But I'm pretty confident for a bug like that we would get at least a hotfix within a couple of days, although with 4 seats we aren't a significant customer to them at all.

[TimFox]

Luckily, being a US citizen, I use customary units, not imperial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
Americans are allowed to use both metric and customary, where the customary units are defined in terms of the international metric units.

Going off the grid in a CAD program is a big nuisance.  Before retirement, one of my reports had the knack for generating a new schematic diagram from an old one, making the needed changes, but it always ended up off the grid in the schematic capture program and therefore harder to edit thereafter.  Since the units in schematic capture are irrelevant (as opposed to PCB layout where they have physical meaning), this had nothing to do with choice of units.