I've been watching the progress of these guys...
Have you used Flux, or know anyone who has? I can't see how this can work or, frankly, why they haven't run out of money yet.
Thank you for the pointer. Interesting concept. At some level, I am in disagreement with the statement 'Unlike software, building hardware is still insanely difficult' - software can be 'insanely hard' as well. But getting past that..... Having SPICE tightly coupled to the schematic capture is an interesting concept...it eliminates a few steps. Works nice on a highly constrained example. Wonder how it works on a larger project? The availability of a wide range of sim models is key to having this uber-design bench.
The project workflow approach reminds me of ' find as many libraries of you can that do some or all of what you want and write the least amount of glue code necessary to 'make it work' approach'.
The PCB layout approach tutorial left me scratching my head. So you 'lift' the board layout for a small set of components and plop it into a larger board layout, make the necessary connections then (re)run the DRC over the entire new assembly? What you just added could potentially really disrupt a layout that was acceptable and now the new board has to be reevaluated. Seems like a lot of thrashing that would result in a lot of time (manually?) rerouting nets. The approach is interesting but there is a heck of a lot of building blocks that have to be around to realize hardware nirvana.... Interesting business model....free and then a cost on a per editor (what ever that is) Thanks
They seem to be mostly programmers! And are applying software methods (collaborate, hack it, ship it, push out bug fixes online often) to hardware design.
Personally, I don't see any upside to having the Spice sims use the same schematic file as will be used to create the PCB. Library issues make that impractical.
It claims to use AI, which doesn't make sense to me. "Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer." Some short number of words, or equivalent parameters, might evoke 10^200 possible circuits, unless actual intelligence is applied continuously all along the way.
We were just discussing engineering project management here. We agreed that management techniques and software work at some levels, but the lowest level of electronic design is so tangled and parallel that micromanagement - if any - is necessary.
Board layout stripping for future AI 'assistant'.
RL
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