Electronic Design Studio?

[Chris56000]

Hi!

Has anyone ever used, or still got a licence for, Electronics Design Studio, a British EDA product released as a successor to Quickroute 4.0/5.0?

I  designed a project for a previous employer on it, and I remember it always had one notorious bugbear, and that was  corruption of the "EDS Key Disk" used to activate it!

Originally issued on cd with a  floppy "key disk", they went over to a serial–key system about 1994 but that wasn't any more reliable either – I made more calls to their help desk over that than any other issue!

They went out of business about 2004/2005  with little warning – for about 4–5 weeks prior to closure, their website said "Our new website is under development" and that was all – I only found out about the firm  closing when I got a red–cross box from EDS saying Activation Failure!!

(I remember their help desk refused to help with backing up the hidden "key–file", but however their system worked, it seemed to be effective because EDS never, to the best of my knowledge, got "cracked" in it's lifetime!)

It wasn't  cheap software for the size/layer/functional limitations you had to put up with but it one good thing going for it – it could do True Type Fonts on PCB silkscreen that rendered  correctly on Gerber's!

Comments?

Chris Williams

[tycz]

I can't help you with Electronics Design Studio, but I noticed you mentioned the use True Type fonts on the PCB here and in the your other Kacad thread. There's a PCB design software package called PCB Elegance which has this feature. It was sold commercially until the developer went out of business about five years ago. Instead of taking the software with him, he made it free and released the source code under the GPL licence. Now I'm maintaining it. It is (very roughly) equivalent to Kicad an Eagle in terms of features. The main downside in the user base (and development speed) is much smaller than those tools.

The website is at http://www.pcbelegance.org if you're interested.

[Chris56000]

Hi!

I've downloaded the latest available copy of PCB Elegance, the update files and 168-page manual!

I'll get some binder covers from work when I'm back on duty and print the Manual for homework reading tomorrow - Was TinyCAD the schematic package that was intended to be complementary to it, or did the PCB Elegance developer intend to make his own package?

Chris Williams