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Fusion, a 3D mechanical design thing sort of like Solidwords, now incorporates Eagle PCB layout. It makes very cute, possibly even useful, 3D images of PC boards. It's free to individuals and startups.

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Does anybody use autoplace? Or autoroute?

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It seems to me that power pours could be one thing that a computer could automate pretty well, with map theory or something. Pours are a nuisance, usually.

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I enjoy designing on paper, hate schematic entry, enjoy PCB layout, and then hate the followup BOMs and Gerbers and stuff. It's just like life and love. I delegate the less enjoyable parts when I can.

It's nice to do a simple all-analog design, start to finish, once in a while. No uP, no FPGA, no customer yet to make silly rules.

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Still needs layer 3 pours and a few long routes.

It needs a 3-position time range switch, which wasn't easy to do, so I used a trimpot with three "positions", full CCW, mid rotation, and full CW. The mid rotation part is very wide, on the theory that the user can hit the end stops hard and mid-rotation reasonably well.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
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jlarkin
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tirsdag den 4. februar 2020 kl. 18.16.44 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com:

Kicad also have a very nice 3d viewer

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and it will export the pcb and components to a step file that can be imported in fusion360

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

This is my board in its new extruded box.

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That's a screen capture from edrawings, which is OK but a bit annoying as a viewer.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Reply to
John Larkin

Autoplace can work, I think the one in the old Protel 99SE works. Their autorouter is so bad it is like something out of a comic book.

Protel 99SE power pour, and their split plane layers work perfectly, in hundreds of boards, never had an issue except one time the PCB fab altered the blowback on the planes and ended up causing islands.

The most important part of a PCB program is the design rule/netlist checking. If it detects every place where the layout doesn't match the connectivity from the schematic, I can excuse some rough edges in various functions, GUI, etc. If the DRC does not 100% detect any difference, then I would not use the program to design anything more complicated than a flashlight.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

I never autoroute, partly because I can't explain all my constraints, and partly because they seem to be so dumb and ugly.

Does it design pours itself, essentially autoroute them?

I don't think we've ever had a problem from the PADS checks. We sometimes, rarely, ignore the warnings but it forces us to look at things. Like if I *want* a part to hang off the edge of the board.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Reply to
John Larkin

Hi, John:-

The 3D view/output of Altium can be useful. It's pretty tedious to ensure t hat each of the 3D models for each component is accurate and properly aligned- sometimes the manufacturers have them but they're faulty in some way (somet imes seriously), or don't have the proper colors or markings if those thing s matter to you. The orientation is usually one of a couple ways and it's n ot uncommnon for the mechanical guy to set the reference plane in some convenient plane for him or her and not on the surface of the PCB.

Making the models from scratchin Solidworks or whatever is time-consuming, and often a lot of the dimensions are not shown so there is a lot of measur ing etc.

I'm sure things are gradually getting better. It's good for documentation a nd as a check to ensure that something isn't going to hit a feature in an enclosure or whatever. A pox on enclosure makers who don't supply accurate

3D models.

Not autoplace. Yes, sometimes autoroute to finish on digital traces that do n't matter. Altium has some usable features for repeated circuits like chan nels.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Reply to
speff

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