Found it. This seems to be a link to the original posting: About time 1:30 in the video.
True. I'm Guessing (TM) that there will be a new stable release of Kicad around mid-2014 as well, given that the previous was last July.
CERN is getting involved in Kicad development which should help mitigate the "Cheetos-covered nerd in basement" perception. ;-)
Schematic capture and layout will probably run you north of $6K. My layout guy has the full suite, I just use schematic capture. They doubled the capture price this year when they got rid of their direct sales. When I first got it I did a one time buy from a distributor and the yearly renewals were a simple online task directly with Altium. Now you have to get everything through a dealer with their associated markups and it seems the dealers are regional. Your dealer is based on your location. I could not find a way to pick and choose the dealer and price shopping amongst them is probably close to impossible.
If you can afford it and deal with the learning curve, setting up your parts library again,etc - it's a nice tool.
But unless you are going to be doing very dense, high layer count, high speed boards I would stay with what you have.
-- Chisolm Republic of Texas
Thanks. That is a solid promise this time. They should have handed him a microphone to muffle the background din of the trade show. In this day and age we have Bluetooth which should make it easy :-)
Yep, happened a while ago. I believe they (or another big entity?) decided against gEDA and for Kicad. Which was not a big surprise to me.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
That won't work at all for me. Even here in the office the Internet goes down at times. I can't afford being dead in the water with my work during those times.
Well, with Eagle you don't need any license server. You just use the license file that they send you after payment, plug it in, and that's it. I can use the same license on my laptop and they trust me that I won't disclose it or let a 2nd person use it simultaneously on my laptop (nobody else ever gets to touch that anyhow).
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
I'm cranky on this topic enough to be a bit of a crank, but the "situational pricing" that I want to have is that I ask for a price, they give me one, and I either say "yes" or "no".
If they come back with a different price the second time, then they were lying the first time and no matter how attractive the second price is I'll go buy from someone honest.
-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
The biggest board I've done to date is four size B pages, and they're not crowded.
Since my strengths are primarily systems, and then software, and since I'm mostly at the "jack of all trades" level for circuit design*, if I were working on something bigger I'd hire a guy to do layout and maintain the PCB design (which, in fact, is what I did with the four-page board, to the advantage of me, my board guy, and my customer).
-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
Well, I use Protel 99SE, the previous generation of the Altium software. The only major thing I think Altium Designer adds is better support of channelized designs. I have some schemes of global editing that make these not TOO painful with P99. I got my version for $2K by buying an old license from a guy in the Netherlands and then buying the upgrade to P99SE. Altium seems to BE really flexible on pricing, and you may be able to wheedle a discount. Or, you might be able to buy a license that is not being used, and was not used as the basis for an upgrade. P99SE runs well on Win2K and XP, and I run it under those OS's using VMware under a Linux host OS. P99SE is about the only Windows software I still use.
But, even P99SE is light years ahead of the hobby-level board/schematic packages. The global editing is VERY powerful, and the design rule checking is somthing I truly trust!
Jon
Well, it's a misconception. If you are using Altium and not sharing it, it's a matter of a few clicks to lock the license to the PC which then works with or without internet connection
Cheers
Klaus
Is it easy to port that license to another PC without Internet connection?
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Unless you're doing 18 layer boards etc, try DIPTRACE... cheap, simple effective. Licence free for 200/300 pins so easy to get going and see if you like it. I use Client 3.2 ( predecessor of Altium) but it won't run on win7.I tried Altium... what a nightmare... but I suppose if you persevere it would get easier.
As I recall, that type of license is not node locked.
For all the bitching and whining I hear about Eagle, I'm astonished people use it at all. Even ameteurs because there's a free version. They whine all day! Let alone actually doing any real work in it. Almost as bad as gEDA!
No one should have to put up with that. As soon as I have enough, investment shall we say, I'll buy an Altium license in a heartbeat.
'Long as we're talking about EDA, don't do PADS. I tried it once. It's priced fully double what Altium is, and isn't worth half the price. I'd use something cheap like Multisim before using that, or anything else Mentor Graphics.
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
Well, I am using Eagle since 10 years and it works nicely for me. The only real gripe I have about it is the lack of a hierarchy but it seems they (finally!) woke up now.
And yeah, I do real work on it. Like a hotrod RF thingamagic right now. Lots of unorthodox switchers, too. To my surprise several of my newer clients are also using Eagle which, of course, makes cooperation really easy.
A couple of years ago I compared and test-drove numerous CAD packages. None of them made me as happy as I was with old Orcad-SDT. So I stuck with Eagle. Once they introduce a hierarchy that might as well be for life because changing CAD librarier is a major pain.
My layouter uses PADS since forever and so does John Larkin's company, and many clients of mine. They are all quite happy with it.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Serious BS.
My Altium Designer runs happily in a XP virtual machine under Linux Mint
16 and VMware, together with Modelsim, Xilinx, the DG8SAQ VNWA, Sigasi, what else. The Internet connection of the virtual machine is usually switched off, only Xilinx wants to call home for every error message.I can easily move the VM from my workstation to the laptop and even _running_ simulations can continue there. At the moment I'm in a hotel room in Munich and could do productive work, if it wasn't for s.e.d :-)
Altium said they would not support me running it on a virtual machine (had some performance problems with design files on network-connected partitions) but me running it on a VM was OK. I asked b4 I bought it. Methinks they put a lot of trust on me, I could abuse it easily.
C.J. probably has no license of his own but lends it from his client over the internet from case to case.
regards, Gerhard
That being one of the major complaints, libraries. Creating symbols and footprints is a snap in Altium. For a simple part, a few minutes, and that includes simple 3D data (even better, if you have a STEP model of the thing). Or if you're lazy, you can even use the IPC compliant footprint generator (and pretty it up by hand, or use it as-is).
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
There was some incompatibility between one of their licence server things and Windows 7 iirc, and I had stopped using XP by then.
Yes I eventually got it sorted out, but it seemed very rude of Altium to put me through that (using up several hours of otherwise billable time), when I know that some people use the pirated DVD and experience none of that crap. If I were Altium then I would always want people who pay for my product to get a better service than those who use it illegally.
Chris
Yes, initially I did this, so the client could also run Altium. Now it is setup so I can run it without internet, but it wasted several hours of my time that a pirate user of Altium (or any user of open source tools) would not have had to waste.
Chris
I've used both on Win7 without much trouble. Does seem to be written for XP; the only 'gotcha' I found was, a fresh install of Win7 has desktop scale set to 125%, which is simply ignored by the layouts of many un-resizable dialogs, making buttons and such inaccessible.
Free software may yet rule the day, but it has a long way to go. Vote Piraten Partei? :^)
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
I cannot remember. But you can just port it to the PC when you have the internet connection. (if in a bind, use your phone for the internet connection, not much data is transferred)
Cheers
Klaus
I can't imagine doing much schematic or PCB design without an Internet connection. Usually with a LOT Of windows open.
The license checkout feature is quite decent. It's only a hassle when someone in a group forgets to return it, but the **$R#$s will do that with physical tools too.
I've done a serious pulse receiver design for an ultrasound system on the train from Cologne to Ulm. No Internet. By the time the train rolled into Ulm Main Station a large chunk of it was completed.
In my case >50% of designs usually consist of SPICE simulations and there Internet access rarely matters. For example, you can use a somewhat similar RF transistor and then download the real model when you have Internet connection again. But not being able to draw a schematic would drive me up the wall because this is often done in parallel, in another window.
Does it work across borders? Or even oceans?
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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