Altium Circuit Studio??

[fuubar67]

Thank you, I will have a look at the DipTrace. I am always happy to support an enthusiastic new company.

How well does DipTrace support differential pair length matching and impedance controlled design?

[Wilksey]

It doesn't...yet, apparently in the next release there will be a high speed "toolbox" if you will.  Eagle does a fairly good job at this, even Proteus doesn't support it, KiCAD seems to me a bit mediocre when it comes to it's "RF Toolbox" and it isn't available under OpenGL rendering, I think they are improving that also.

I don't know if CS has high speed design?

[fuubar67]

Yep they do have differential routing, I will have to evaluate it, see if they skimped on that too.

[DerekG]

How well does DipTrace support differential pair length matching and impedance controlled design?

Unfortunately we have to wait until the new release for the full features of this. However, if you simply rest your mouse over the track, a pop up dialog box gives you the net name, the track width & the total track length.

At this stage it is envisaged that the next release will probably be around July/August 2015.

[cwalex]

I have a CM beta invite. They wanted me to sign nda etc
To much work tbh...

Hi Spikee,

Do you know if Altium will let you give the invite to someone else? I'm interested in trying out the beta.

[snoopy]

Don't know if this has been posted but there is an overview of Circuit Studio on youtube



cheers

[Wilksey]

Yeah, I have a version for "testing" and the deal breaker for me at the moment is that it doesn't cross support the PCB files with AD.

As soon as I saw that it didn't support that I kind of gave up on it, I know that AD is supposed to be updated to support CS, so i'm waiting patiently....

[Rigby]

Yeah, I have a version for "testing" and the deal breaker for me at the moment is that it doesn't cross support the PCB files with AD.

As soon as I saw that it didn't support that I kind of gave up on it, I know that AD is supposed to be updated to support CS, so i'm waiting patiently....

It was mentioned earlier that AD can open CS files without problem.  The opposite will probably never be true without 3rd party conversion.

[daedalus]

Just a quick heads up, farnell are sending out unsolicited 15% off discounts to anyone who contacted them about CircuitStudio

[Zbig]

Just a quick heads up, farnell are sending out unsolicited 15% off discounts to anyone who contacted them about CircuitStudio

Awesome, that changes everything. Now, I'll definitely take the plunge! Oh, wait... nope - still 2.5 my month's worth of salary. And I'm not on a minimum wage, either.

Don't take it personally, daedalus. Just wanted to stress out there are still non-third-world countries out there, where that pricing doesn't make any kind of sense, whatsoever. For me, CS is just as good as dead.

[Christopher]

For the package feeling rushed, with a different, crappier,  altium knockoff,  the price is too much.

What they should have done was keep it the same as Altium with all the fpga simulation and the other useless junk, pro features 90% of people don't use, and call it altium basic. Same file formats. Price of about 800 quid and it would fly off the shelf and allow them to fix the bugs for a year or so Then they could increase the price.

Problem altium are having is they are segmenting their market by having too many products.  That's bad news all round

[Icchan]

I'm appalled that the program was released for sale in this condition. Usability problems are the most obvious. All the random crashes and missing options and settings that really should be there so that you could make the program behave the way you find most useful... those are the problems in my view.

Even library editor crashes when I open it and some times the program crashes when i try to close it... without any reason :/

They're idiots for giving you 14 days of trial and expect people to jump to it when the program is multi thousand dollar tool...

[DerekG]

I'm appalled that the program was released for sale in this condition.

There is immense pressure on the programmers to bring Circuit Studio up to speed quickly. Remember, CS was only hatched as a result of an approach by Farnell in October 2014. It has come this far in less than 6 months which is a pretty good effort.

Over the next 12 months you will see many improvements.

[jmarkwolf]

I'm appalled that the program was released for sale in this condition.

There is immense pressure on the programmers to bring Circuit Studio up to speed quickly. Remember, CS was only hatched as a result of an approach by Farnell in October 2014. It has come this far in less than 6 months which is a pretty good effort.

Over the next 12 months you will see many improvements.

Agreed.

With 15% off, and you figure the mandatory first year support at $500, that puts the software at about $2000, for 95% of everything I use on the "full-boat" Altium everyday at work.

Once they add an integrated Gerber viewer and PcbDoc support, which I suspect is soon to follow, I'm good.

Isn't the full version of Eagle almost $2000?

I'd much rather plunk my money down an CS than Eagle.

[Rigby]

If CS supports PcbDoc, then many company will move from AD to CS, because most designers don't to anything beyond the capability of CS.

It doesn't.  CS can't open AD design files natively, last I checked.  The opposite is true.

Altium definitely don't want users to go heterogeneous.

They do, though, but only in one direction.  The envision a situation where the experienced users are running AD, and the junior engineers are running CS.  They want the AD users to be able to open and modify designs created in CS.  This is to allow juniors to work in CS for less cost per seat, but still be doing their work in a tool that the senior engineers can use.

[Icchan]

With 15% off, and you figure the mandatory first year support at $500, that puts the software at about $2000, for 95% of everything I use on the "full-boat" Altium everyday at work.

Once they add an integrated Gerber viewer and PcbDoc support, which I suspect is soon to follow, I'm good.

Isn't the full version of Eagle almost $2000?

I'd much rather plunk my money down an CS than Eagle.

Full Eagle license with auto-router is $1640 but since auto-router is not very useful (especially the Eagle one), you would buy it without it and that makes $1145. Which is less than half of the €2631 they're asking of the Circuit Studio at Element14 (including that subsription). And mind you, Dollar and Euro are in unity and Euro will go below Dollar in short time.

My gripe is that with promises of a great program in the future, one takes a risk when laying down that €2500+ for the Circuit Studio. And if you need a program that can do the job right now and not a year from now, it's not for you. Unless you like show stopping bugs and random crashes that will corrupt your data (happened to me when testing the program the other day, lost all the work done... luckily only a testing circuit and nothing important).

There are other options though... For example, DipTrace is basically a "beefed up version" of Eagle (all the features of Eagle and more, though few caveats). And since the full suite of DipTrace is only $895, I'm better off comparing what Circuit Studio brings over DipTrace with the price difference, and it's currently not much.

So it's a though call when you need the software _now_ to increase your productivity and you're on a budget constraint that doesn't warrant for a program that's 2500€ AND very incomplete and unstable.

Maybe in a year Circuit Studio will be a real thing (if they do update it very frequently), but until then it's not something one want's to use to increase productivity in a project that has time schedule and budget considerations.

And I have not heard or been offered anything relating to 15% off of Circuit Studio, so I'm basing my opinion on the state of the program and the full price.

[jmarkwolf]

Full Eagle license with auto-router is $1640 but since auto-router is not very useful (especially the Eagle one), you would buy it without it and that makes $1145. Which is less than half of the €2631 they're asking of the Circuit Studio at Element14 (including that subsription). And mind you, Dollar and Euro are in unity and Euro will go below Dollar in short time.

My gripe is that with promises of a great program in the future, one takes a risk when laying down that €2500+ for the Circuit Studio. And if you need a program that can do the job right now and not a year from now, it's not for you. Unless you like show stopping bugs and random crashes that will corrupt your data (happened to me when testing the program the other day, lost all the work done... luckily only a testing circuit and nothing important).

There are other options though... For example, DipTrace is basically a "beefed up version" of Eagle (all the features of Eagle and more, though few caveats). And since the full suite of DipTrace is only $895, I'm better off comparing what Circuit Studio brings over DipTrace with the price difference, and it's currently not much.

So it's a though call when you need the software _now_ to increase your productivity and you're on a budget constraint that doesn't warrant for a program that's 2500€ AND very incomplete and unstable.

Maybe in a year Circuit Studio will be a real thing (if they do update it very frequently), but until then it's not something one want's to use to increase productivity in a project that has time schedule and budget considerations.

And I have not heard or been offered anything relating to 15% off of Circuit Studio, so I'm basing my opinion on the state of the program and the full price.

Hi Icchan

All valid points, and I considered delaying my purchase for some of those same reasons. But in the end I was able to justify the purchase/gamble, considering the discounts.

I didn't experience any bugs nor crashes in my eval, but admittedly didn't do an end-to-end exercise. It loaded current Altium schematics and libraries without hitch, and I was able to edit the files and generate reports, etc., although I had to jump through some hoops to translate PcbDocs.

I've evaluated Diptrace, Eagle and others as well, but have been using the commercial versions of Protel/Altium at work for nearly 20 years, plan to do design consulting when I retire in a couple years, am reluctant to change horses mid-stream and decided to take the gamble on Circuit Studio.

Hopefully Newark will make good on their "press" and Circuit Studio will become a good viable tool. If they fix bugs and occasionally add features I can make due with it.

[Lromine]

Hello Everyone, My name is Lawrence Romine, Director of New Business Development, here at Altium in San Diego. I am very pleased to let everyone know that we are now in Beta with v1.1 of CircuitStudio. We have been paying very close attention to the feedback from the evaluators, our initial customers, feedback via e14 support personnel, and social media channels. You guys can all expect to see this version released mid-May. Along with the typical maintenance one should expect for this product, we are adding the capabilities I've listed below to the toolset. Please know your participation in forums like EEVblog greatly assists us in getting the product fine tuned. Here's what's coming:

- Importers Updated - AD10 and older, Protel, PCAD (these are in addition to the Eagle/OrCAD/PADs importers in there now), and yes, that includes AD10 Board files
- Mixed Mode Simulation
- .STEP Export
- DXF Import

Again, we appreciate the dialogue! Keep it coming!

[jmarkwolf]

Hello Everyone, My name is Lawrence Romine, Director of New Business Development, here at Altium in San Diego. I am very pleased to let everyone know that we are now in Beta with v1.1 of CircuitStudio. We have been paying very close attention to the feedback from the evaluators, our initial customers, feedback via e14 support personnel, and social media channels. You guys can all expect to see this version released mid-May. Along with the typical maintenance one should expect for this product, we are adding the capabilities I've listed below to the toolset. Please know your participation in forums like EEVblog greatly assists us in getting the product fine tuned. Here's what's coming:

- Importers Updated - AD10 and older, Protel, PCAD (these are in addition to the Eagle/OrCAD/PADs importers in there now), and yes, that includes AD10 Board files
- Mixed Mode Simulation
- .STEP Export
- DXF Import

Again, we appreciate the dialogue! Keep it coming!

Excellent news, indeed. Go, man go.

[Lromine]

Excellent news, indeed. Go, man go.
[/quote]

We very much appreciate your business and your loyalty to the Altium Brand, Mark!

[DerekG]

My name is Lawrence Romine, Director of New Business Development, here at Altium in San Diego.

Lawrence, it is good to see that Altium is keeping an eye on the comments here on EEVBlog.com

It is a shame that Altium felt it necessary to hassle Dave Jones about his website some time back.

As I'm sure you are aware, Dave's website gets more hits everyday than Altium manage on their own website.

As you Altium's "Director of New Business Development" will you kindly answer the following for us:

Is the development team spending:
A/ more time,
B/ the same amount of time,
C/ less time,
on CircuitMaker than on Circuit Studio?

[Lromine]

Derek, et al, We have quite a large development team and those resources are allocated as needed across all our products.  Also, note that some IP is shared across our product range. So, not really an easy questions to answer. I can only assume that the motivation for your question is because you would like to know when CircuitMaker will be available. We have already announced publicly that CircuitMaker will be in Open Beta (available to anyone and everyone) on May 16th to coincide with the Bay Area Maker Faire

http://blog.circuitmaker.com/#Blogs/The-Road-to-Maker-Faire

[VEGETA]

Lawrence, I have some questions:

1- will CM have offline project storage without the need to share the project If one wants this?

2- if one worked well with CM, will he be good with CS (an AD)? i.e, the same (or close) menus, shortcuts,.... etc?

thanks for your support.

[Lromine]

VEGETA, There does seem to be some misconceptions in the storage area. So, I'm glad you asked. There is no local storage, cloud only. However, this does not mean that you will have to share those designs with anyone. Simply tick the box that says "private", and it is just that, private and not shared nor seen by anyone else in the community. That said, you can, however, set up "teams" of people and share/collaborate on designs with just the people in your team. As and for the consistency from CircuitMaker to CircuitStudio, absolutely yes. It is the same interface and, and therefore, any muscle memory you've developed will definitely be retained. As and for moving to Altium Designer from there, all these products share the Altium DNA. So, things like workflow, project structure, etc and, of course, your libraries and designs definitely do carry over. As well, we've made this easy for you via a credit should you decide to step-up from CircuitStudio to an Altium Designer Board license. That credit is now listed on both our website here http://www.circuitstudio.com/#how-to-buy and the e14 website here http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-73741

[VEGETA]

VEGETA, There does seem to be some misconceptions in the storage area. So, I'm glad you asked. There is no local storage, cloud only. However, this does not mean that you will have to share those designs with anyone. Simply tick the box that says "private", and it is just that, private and not shared nor seen by anyone else in the community. That said, you can, however, set up "teams" of people and share/collaborate on designs with just the people in your team. As and for the consistency from CircuitMaker to CircuitStudio, absolutely yes. It is the same interface and, and therefore, any muscle memory you've developed will definitely be retained. As and for moving to Altium Designer from there, all these products share the Altium DNA. So, things like workflow, project structure, etc and, of course, your libraries and designs definitely do carry over. As well, we've made this easy for you via a credit should you decide to step-up from CircuitStudio to an Altium Designer Board license. That credit is now listed on both our website here http://www.circuitstudio.com/#how-to-buy and the e14 website here http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-73741

Well, thanks! that was a new info there. There was a big misunderstanding by me and others about cloud-only. But I really prefer to have local storage option as it is essential. not always you have a connection and sometimes it is not good. cloud is nice, but local storage is a must in my opinion.

Nice to have that consistency between the 2 as most people who use CM will buy CS if they want to get a pro tool I guess. So, any idea now about the limitation of CM? Can one make a commercial board with it (regardless of it's size or importance)?

thanks.