Eagle CAD - Quick question

Don't know, but I would hope so.

How about Kicad? I figure that's the next package I'll have to learn.

George H.

I hope you can. My lab's Altium subscription can be used by whoever signs on, wherever they are. Doing layouts from both home and work is a big advantage.

Are you sure about that? Sometimes I head out there with my mountain bike and sit on a rock, doing design work. The only reminder of "civilization" is the occasional aricraft going by at high altitude. The only signs of life are some hawks doing aerobatics, deer trotting by and coyotes howling. Internet connection? Nope. Cell coverage? Zero bars.

Try the boonies. Doesn't have to be via mountain bike. Sometimes 1-2h of trail hiking suffices.

Premium).

t.

Kicad works great and version 5.0 released shortly should be able to import eagle projects basically with the push of a button and have a much cleaner library system.

Digikey recently made the biggest donation ever to Kicad and they are worki ng on providing Kicad symbols and footprints for every part they sell

You can "check out" and "roam" with your Altium license for an arbitrary time period: hours, years. The license is a one time purchase, the only thing that runs out (your subscription, for a lesser annual fee) is software updates. You retain the right to use the version of software you bought (up to whatever update your subscription ended on, if you don't renew) forever.

It does nag if you become unconnected and don't have a license checked out, but it doesn't become outright inoperable just because it can't phone home.

Easily the best license system in its price class I've seen.

Tim

That would be ok if the nagging can be turned off or doesn't happen every few mintes.

The 2nd post here is interesting:

Last time I checked, years ago, it was north of $5k AFAIR. Anyhow, I found the price a bit excessive. When I guided a layout at a company that used Altium I thought it was a nice system but for me that price was not warranted and Eagle does what I need.

...

Well, the solution to that is obvious, and given -- 'check out' the license on your laptop with a duration of ~forever.

When you need to use it on another computer, release it and use it wherever.

You can run your own license server, just as well. Stick that on the laptop, and you don't need to 'check out' the license, ever again: run it on the laptop, it's right there; run it on the desktop, it finds the server on the laptop (assuming the laptop is connected to your home network) and there it is.

Almost no one uses vaults. (I only know one guy who does. He works at Tesla. They have lots of boards, they need it.) But yeah, they're there if you need them.

Incidentally, subscription carries permission to use the Altium Content Vault, where you get all the current symbols and footprints (no SPICE, that I've seen anyway). As in the post above, that permission is perpetual, at least up to the version your subscription ended on.

SVN works okay with TortoiseSVN and such. It's clunky, but oh well. Anyway, SVN, versioning, and multi-user design merging features aren't anything you'd need (or very much of, at least).

I negotiated them to a price that was still north of $5k, but just barely so. Maybe they can go even lower, I didn't press them that hard. Not sure if it's gone up or down in recent years. They have lower and higher tier products now, too.

If you'd like to try "AD lite", that's Circuit Studio. AFAIK, it's devestated Eagle's market share, on top of Autodesk's own push to kill it (or at least, we can only assume that's what their intent was; that's definitely been the effect).

CS imports Eagle effortlessly. AFAIK, CS can be licensed in the same way as AD, it's only the default setup that's cloud based.

There's also KiCAD, AFAIK about as quirky as Eagle but free-as-in-beer. You can run it on Mars for all anyone cares. And it's improving constantly. I've seen some lovely boards made with it, it's quite capable.

But alas, sunken costs being what they are -- since you've already taken the pains to deal with Eagle's quirks, you don't have much need of other software, anyway -- right? (I guess the real question is, why did the Altium license comment twig you in the first place? Oh well, nevermind.)

Tim

I started as a PCAD user, purchasing upgrades as they came along. Altium purchased PCAD and offered us free licenses as an inducement to switch. Eventually they stopped making updates for PCAD, so I learned their system and could select what to use for each design. They continued making improvements. I now strongly prefer Altium Designer. I think its cost pales when compared to the total cost of our time making layouts. It's a time saver, and helps me to make fewer errors.

Am 25.02.2018 um 17:14 schrieb Tim Williams:

I simply installed it, and all other important windows programs like Xilinx, DXO etc on a virtual Win7 machine under VMware. So, moving to different hardware is just like moving a 70 Gig file there. The design data are always on the virtual D: drive, never ever on the virtual machine. I did freeze the virtual machine and stored 3 copies with friend/brother 700 Km away from each other, that should survive minor acts of god. Just pull a new copy in case of fire, virus or worms.

There is no nagging, just the word "disconnected" in the title line of the root window. Altium does not give you any support when you run it on a virtual machine. But I found out that the helping hand was always firmly attached to my right arm in the past, so that was not much of a loss.

regards, Gerhard

Ok, but don't you get it at the educational discount, like 97% off?

Can't count the time to create layouts since that work has to be invested no matter what. I use Eagle and after Autodesk deep-sixed the perpetual license I'll be remaining on version 7 until probably forever. My layouter uses PADS so the only way to transfer is a netlist and then it doesn't matter what CAD I use.