Electronics > Eagle
Eagle will be part of Fusion360
ehughes:
Pure speculation at this point but I think EAGLE as a standalone product will be a thing of the past. It doesn't take a lot of brainpower to read these tea leaves. Not saying that this is a bad thing for those who do integrated design but my *guess* is that you will soon be purchasing Fusion360, not EAGLE.
http://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/fusion-forecast-dont-resist-current/
http://schnitgercorp.com/2016/06/29/autodesk-acquires-pcb-design-fusion-360/
I am willing to best a basket of chicken wings that the UI will be dumped(which is good news), the guts will be thrown out(which is good news) and EAGLE will be simply a name for the ECAD component of Fusion360. The internal architecture will *never* work with an integrated tool as the current code base implements a system that is stove-piped *by design*. The current method of move into the 3d space in EAGLE is an ugly hack and I can't see a large company like Autodesk having a tool that looks this primitive.
When it is all over, I am guessing that you will have the the name EAGLE and the XML file format. There is absolutely no way to sell EAGLE in its current form as an Autodesk product in the long term. If I was a pointy haired boss, I would probably be doing the same. The "old customers" will go to KiCAD or Dip Trace regardless of what Autodesk does. They are after competing with Dassault and fish with much bigger pocket books.
I am not saying any of this is bad per say, just that I can't see the old business strategy working in the long term. Autodesk is about integrated product design. EAGLE in its current form will never able to be part of that mission.
To them, I say onward and upward. We need better tools! I am a Solidworks and Altium User but some healthy competition from Autodesk will be a very good thing.
Karel:
--- Quote from: ehughes on February 13, 2017, 02:28:49 pm ---I am willing to best a basket of chicken wings that the UI will be dumped(which is good news), the guts will be thrown out(which is good news) and EAGLE will be simply a name for the ECAD component of Fusion360.
--- End quote ---
You think they paid £20 million for Cadsoft just for the "name"?
janoc:
--- Quote from: ehughes on February 13, 2017, 02:28:49 pm ---Pure speculation at this point but I think EAGLE as a standalone product will be a thing of the past. It doesn't take a lot of brainpower to read these tea leaves. Not saying that this is a bad thing for those who do integrated design but my *guess* is that you will soon be purchasing Fusion360, not EAGLE.
--- End quote ---
I am Fusion360 user for my tinkering and I don't believe such move would make any sense whatsoever. Perhaps Fusion will get some PCB import capability and Eagle gets better support for mechanical CAD, but otherwise those are completely different worlds and user bases. Few mechanical engineers need PCB design support (and even know how to design boards) and few EEs need a full blown mechanical CAD package - most need only import and export. Merging those two products wouldn't really help anyone. Ever heard about jack of all trades master of none?
Also Fusion is mostly an experimental "sandbox" for Autodesk for trying out new ideas and to have a foothold in the low end market but the real money is in AutoCAD and Inventor, not in Fusion360.
ehughes:
--- Quote ---You think they paid £20 million for Cadsoft just for the "name"?
--- End quote ---
http://amigobulls.com/stocks/ADSK/income-statement/annual
For a name, a starting point and an existing customer base £20 million is a noise bit to them.
janekm:
Have a look at this page: http://www.autodesk.com/products
Notice anything? That's right, Autodesk aren't in the habit of retiring products if they have active users. They have Fusion 360 but Autocad isn't going anywhere.
I think they're hoping they can fix Eagle bit by bit (seems crazy to me too), but if not I think they would consider building a new product from the ground up using the experience from the Eagle team but as a new separate product that would try to gain new customers through new approaches and new licensing models. Seems like a bit of a challenge though even though compared to the mechanical CAD industry all PCB design software is embarrassingly bad.
I was actually quite disappointed that Autodesk bought Eagle, because I think if they had instead made an attempt to build a completely new tool from the ground up, in the vein of Fusion 360, it could have been something really interesting, taking some ideas from parametric CAD, design history, more "smarts" throughout.
Even autorouting would be interesting to have another look at... So far almost all autorouting algorithms are terrible because they are purely rules-based, but applying some of the recent advances in convolutional neural networks and reinforcement learning, effectively teaching the algorithm what good routing looks like (so it should learn what good decoupling looks like, or BGA fanout, good groundplane, etc) would be really interesting.
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