SolidWorks is cool, sort of

What now takes seconds:

- checking a PCB layout,

- falling in love?

;-)

Being old and cantankerous that is exactly how I do my simple PCBs to this day, except that I use Corel draw and layers.

I spent a week trying to get a PCB cad program to work, gave up and did the PCB in a day.

There is an online website that will convert Corel drawings to the correct format for PCBs.

Would you entrust mission-critical business operations to obsolete, unsupported software?

Far more than I’d trust the ever changing buggy offerings of Adobe/Microsoft/etc . Banking finds COBOL works just fine. I know some major pharmaceutical plants still run critical processes on HP1000-21MX minicomputers from the 1970s!

It works fine. Makes lots of beautiful boards. Some recent ones:

A lot of companies do, for one reason or another.

I inherited a hammer from my grandfather. It pounds nails just fine.

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to think of everything else as a nail."

You expected that one, I suppose.

Jeroen Belleman

I use 20 year old CAD software. IN a walled garden

It would have helped to have someone walk you through it.

I was just a kid running DOS when I learned to use PADS. Now, older and crankier, I still use PADS. And it will open all the old files.

What's weird is that we did dumb single and double sided boards back then, with leaded resistors and TO92 transistors and DIP14 ICs. Now we're doing 8 and 10 layer boards with 500-ball 0.8 mm pitch BGAs, multiple pour layers, 0306 caps, coplanar waveguides, thousands of stitching vias. But the old PADS would have done all that just fine. PCBs really haven't changed. Just the video resolution is better now.

And the PCB houses will still make boards from the same Gerber files.

The advantage of a PCB program, over a drawing program, is that you can draw a schematic and import it into a PCB and check it and stuff. And you can have a library of parts, each with a schematic symbol and a multilayer PCB decal.

Some of our boards have a thousand parts.

Opposite of you, I use PADS as a drawing program. And in ECO mode, I can just draw a PCB without a netlist or anything.

Gosh, did you invent that phrase?

With schematic and PCB software working together, it'll also help you make sure that all of the connections described in the schematic are in the PCB. A drawing program won't do that for you, which opens up a vector for missing connections that lead to bad boards. That this kind of capability is available to hobbyist "weekend warriors" like me is nothing short of amazing.

Here's my latest project, a recreation of some old hardware from just a scanned PDF:

Sure, it works fine ... until the day it doesn’t.

And then, in the words of the song, who’re ya gonna call?

Sure, it works fine ... until the day it doesn’t.

And then, in the words of the song, who’re ya gonna call?

Hammer-and-nail technology hasn’t changed appreciably in, since before your grandfather was born.

Electronics is a slightly different matter.

Do you consider your software tools to be a strategic asset, or just an unavoidable expense?

The thing with Open Source is, you learn to use a range of tools.

Of course, the costs do add up. One tool might only be $0, but then you realize that’s $0 *per seat*, and the following month you discover you have to pay another $0 to keep using the tool, and so on every month, or even every week. Pretty soon you find you’re paying $00, or even $000 if you don’t keep your costs under control. It’s just too tempting to add more pieces of software to do more different jobs.

Lots of other pcb cad packages accept PADS files.

As many mechanical design packages accept dwg and dxf and step files.

If a PCB sells for $5000, and we plan to sell hundreds of them, we'd certainly lose sleep over the $0 cost of the layout tools.

PCB layout software is common and pretty much the same, so is hardly strategic. Cost is minor too.

Our functions and circuits are strategic. And some of our Spice models.