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Is Altium free anywhere?
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tszaboo:

--- Quote from: nctnico on May 14, 2023, 07:10:20 pm ---Kicad more or less killed Eagle (with a bit of help from Autodesk though) and several other low end PCB design packages. And Altium will be next in a couple of years. Altium may have a lot of features but the bugs and extremely low performance make that Altium sits between a rock and a hard place. It is too expensive to do simple boards with and it is not good enough for complex boards. Every SoC reference design I have come across is made using Orcad.

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KiCAD is OK, and it improved a lot sine the beginning. And it's possible to compete with altium in the "let's connect the dots with lines without crossing" parts of the software quite easily, but that's not what Altium is about, and it hasn't been for a while now. Right now I'm reviewing my ECN procedures, because (I think) it's quite possible that I can automate the whole thing in Altium, saving hours of work for the tiny "let's change a capacitor" kinda changes, automatically informing the people implementing it, and all without me copying the same info over and over again. And while it's still compliant with regulations.
So sure, you can make green things in Eagle, or even in KiCAD, but when you want to automate documetnation, buy components, keep supply chain functional, they are miles away.
And the IC design companies are going to use Cadence software because they get it basically free due to the other tools they use. But TI uses Altium for example.

--- Quote from: MathWizard on May 16, 2023, 11:10:36 am ---
--- Quote from: hans on May 14, 2023, 08:43:52 am ---No Altium is not free, nor cheap. 2k$/yr for individual is a lot.

Just assume people borrow Altium from work, etc.

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What makes it so good or useful,,, or niche, that a program is worth that much....and per year ??

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I don't know, how much do think an engineer costs while spending a thousand hour learning a new software and messing up a board because some silly mistake?
hans:
Or the cost/salary of an EE engineer. Can easily run 100-150$/hr. 2k$ license = 13-20 hrs max saved. In 1 year! That's only 15-25min a week.
For a business having a full-time CAD user, it's a no brainer. For a private individual, maybe not so much.

The amount of busy-work I've seen a colleague perform with Eagle was immense. Every BOM had to be manually formatted and edited.
Editing schematics and PCBs was tedious. Right click -> "select group". Drag. Okay, use tool, move. Oof,  misclick. CTRL+Z. Oh lost selection.. okay again.. Right click -> "Select group". Drag. Okay, now I want to edit the footprints of all precision resistors from 0420 to 0603. Oh I need to do it 1 by 1? Okay.. right click, edit properties.. paste. Only 15 more dialogs to go..

I agree with Nctnico that KiCad has completely voided the need for Eagle. However, I never think the canonical entry of designs is a problem with these CAD tools. You can pretty much represent any schematic/PCB artwork in all CAD packages nowadays. However, how easy/quick it is to draw&edit. Altium is still miles ahead.  To me, Altium feels like editing using easy to edit sticky notes, while Eagle felt like trying to draw and revise schematics with acrylic paint and perma markers.

E.g. in Altium you have property filtering, property querying, stack based selections (instead of "tools") and selection editor. I use it all the time. I don't think Eagle has any of this, or not in the versions when I made the jump. I think in KiCad you can do certain stuff with the scripting language.. which is useful, but it's not going to be a 30sec job for the odd things to change on a PCB.
Zero999:

--- Quote from: tooki on May 15, 2023, 08:54:41 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on May 15, 2023, 06:17:47 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on May 15, 2023, 07:59:51 am ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on May 14, 2023, 09:50:49 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on May 14, 2023, 04:30:21 pm ---Basically, "KiCad is just as good as Altium" is a typical open-source software fanboy claim. It's just as untrue as the claims that "LibreOffice is just as good as Microsoft Office"
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I don't know about Altium vs KiCAD, but I have to disagree with you about LibreOffice vs MS Office. I find MS Office virtually unusable. It's appalling. LibreOffice is much better. I've taken work home, just so I can use LibreOffice, because MS Office is too slow and clunky. It's not a matter of taking time to get used to it. I've used plenty of other GUIs in my time, not just on Windows, but other platforms and have definitely found MS Office to be one of the worst.

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Forget about the user interface for a moment. (Especially since that is, to an extent, a matter of taste and familiarity.)

The issue is that LibreOffice's feature set isn't nearly as broad. It's more than enough for basic tasks, but it's simply missing many advanced things. So when people say it's "just as good", they're people who have yet to run into the absence of a feature. They don't consider that the other features are used by other people, and aren't just useless fluff.

(Also, they're much less disciplined about API stability. I worked at a software company whose product integrates with word processors. LibreOffice Writer was a constant problem, because the scripting API would often break with updates. Word's scripting and add-on APIs just worked. To this day they haven't even bothered trying to make an add-on for Writer.)

It's the same with the other examples I gave: the feature sets simply are not there. They may be adequate for casual users. (Including people who occasionally use them for professional work.) But they aren't sufficiently feature-rich for serious professional use. You need features that simply aren't there. You may be able to achieve the same end result, but it'll take more work in the less-capable program, so with time being money, professionals will pay for the more efficient tool. And that's precisely why professionals aren't going to switch to KiCad in droves anytime soon.

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What features does MS Office have that you absolutely need?

I've found MS Office to be much worse than LO, when it comes to transferring files between versions. It would regularly break things more often. Pick your poison.



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I didn’t say it wasn’t good enough for me so asking me for how it’s insufficient for me is not a fair question.

Even so, “absolutely need” is a different bar from “good enough”, which is basically how it’s presented.

Regardless, the situation is really simple: if it were “good enough” for most situations, it would be dominant in most environments. But it isn’t, so clearly it’s not good enough.

Ultimately, what annoys me is open source zealots who declare “it’s equivalent!” without understanding users’ needs. It’s dishonest, and that annoys me. A fair comparison acknowledges that the commercial product may have some real advantages, and the open source product may have some real disadvantages. But the fawning over the open source software is often religious, not based on actual experience in using it in a given situation.

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Market dominance often has nothing to do with superiority, or even being good enough. It often comes down to vendor lock-in and that both people and organisations are reluctant to change.

I dislike zealotry in general, whether it be pushing open source, or MS Office.

I agree LO is not equivalent to MS Office. I my opinion it's better. You're completely free to disagree and that's fine. I have no intention of trying to push anyone into using it. Use whatever meets your needs. I certainly don't think open source software is necessarily better than propriety. In some cases it is: open source UNIX is widely considered superior to Windows as a server, but not so good as a desktop. I happen to use it as a desktop, but I'm in the minority, which is fine and I can see why the majority of people prefer Windows.


--- Quote from: Simon on May 15, 2023, 09:20:47 pm ---I'm not talking about changing over within the same organization or using something that apparently is hard work. I have used several and they are generally about the same. I'd not expect a new person to be just turning new boards out next day but if knowing one program is such a skill then uh. You got a problem.

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Gnumeric is preferred by many in the scientific field. For a long time, it could handle larger spreadsheets, than Excel.
Simon:

--- Quote from: floobydust on May 15, 2023, 09:40:32 pm ---
How are we measuring the difficulty changing over, learning the new software?
If it's taking a long time, surely it's due to low IQ? How many hours are you allotting for the new staff to get up to speed?

I saw many well-educated, intelligent EE's choke when expected to figure it out on their own. Because CADD software complexity is ever increasing and most has old legacy and clutzy UI to make it harder. No EE likes to be in a new job and starting from scratch with the tools. Or even hired in the first place - employers want the skills right off the bat.
Try sit down with AutoCAD or SolidWorks and tell me you can pick that up in a few days - no, you need the courses on it and months of experience.

Still thinking a software change is not difficult - it trashed morale, needed new libraries built, and months before people were fluent, and even then slow going.
We are assuming it's no big deal to change over and I say careful, it may no longer be trivial.

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I have found that by and large ECAD is the same process and methods most of the time. It's not too difficult to get the basics if you need to.

3D CAD is what you give an example of, this is somewhat different. I was trained on Solid Edge, I then tried to use free CAD, and my god, I take issue with those that claim it is the greatest etc, it's appalling. Then I started my current job, we use Creo, of fuck! what a mess that is, I now see where freeCAD came from, beyond it's actual limitations it reminds me of creo. 3D CAD programs have nowhere near the pretty standard way of working that ECAD has, it's a different beast. Having learnt one I was more prepared to learn another, but still it can be a challenge.
c64:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 14, 2023, 01:42:16 pm ---Altium spent a long time watching with tears in their eyes as practically the entire Chinese design market uses Altium 99SE for free, it was the industry standard, and they couldn't do anything about it.

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Why do they use this particular version and not something more recent?
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