EEVblog #527 - Altium Entry Level PCB Tool Rant

[NickS]

want fpga,ip cores and compilers? add 2K

Yeah but then nobody would buy that option.
They must flog it off with something else everyone wants so they can say 'Look! The FPGA module is selling like hotcakes! It wasn't such a brain dead idea after all." 

[PeteInTexas]

For the hobbyist market, they should develop something web based that PCB houses can deploy for themselves and be a one stop shop those that in reality only do something once or twice a year.

That would be a winner: for the hobbyist access to all features of the best without paying a dime for it; for the PCB house, pcb orders.

[free_electron]

For the hobbyist market, they should develop something web based that PCB houses can deploy for themselves and be a one stop shop those that in reality only do something once or twice a year.

That would be a winner: for the hobbyist access to all features of the best without paying a dime for it; for the PCB house, pcb orders.

NO ! absolutely not!

web based is crap. you need to be online to use it. that sucks and the user interface is slow as hell.

as for pcb houses : i want choice. china is cheap ! ( hehe. now i'm the guy asking for cheap ) and you are tied into a closed format.
give us at least gerber data so we can go where we want.

[dtfi]

Altium have the problem of being in a position where the full all-you-can-eat unrestricted version of Eagle is $1200, and Altium's is currently, what $6K-ish?

I'm currently evaluating Altium and their sales guys harass me every couple days.  Very annoying.  Price tag is about $9,000/user.  For that price you can buy a 30-user license of Eagle. 

[AlfBaz]

For that price you can buy a 30-user license of Eagle.

Probably take that many seats to do the work of one AD seat

As for the modular approach, my fear is that after a while it will end up costing much, much more.

As it is now they allocate development on sections of the software and keep an eye on the total price but if each module is sold separately then increasing the price of a module from $300 to $500 due to some new feature wont seem so off-putting but it will soon add up if you need a lot of modules.

Not every pcb job needs top tear feature's but when you do need them they should just be there. If you start splitting up the PCB tool you'll end up with prices like allegro and mentor. How shit would it be if you paid $xxx for the PCB tool only to find you need to pay extra $$ for the IPC footprint wizard

[Psi]

Porting from Delphi to C# really shouldn't introduce bugs.
Delphi is quite logical without the 100 obscure ways to do the same thing that you get with C.
So conversion is quite simple. (Going the other way is hard)

Any bugs will be caused by them deciding to "rework" the way AD works behind the scenes.
(There will likely be bits in pieces of current code that they wish they had done differently and they may take this opportunely to rewrite those areas while they're porting)

[JoannaK]

Altium have the problem of being in a position where the full all-you-can-eat unrestricted version of Eagle is $1200, and Altium's is currently, what $6K-ish?

I'm currently evaluating Altium and their sales guys harass me every couple days.  Very annoying.  Price tag is about $9,000/user.  For that price you can buy a 30-user license of Eagle.

What's point purchasing 30 licenses to software that don't offer the features one want? Or a software that hinders instead of helps the project.

As far as I have seen, these 'lesser' programs (Eagle, Diptrace) suck badly on many basic aspects of board making. And I'm not talking about professional grade RF/DDR/serdes designs here. The problem is that the basic routing (manual) is simply not from this century, with most tools it's actually easier/faster to draw with deco-dalo pen.

I know there are plenty of (obviously highly masocistic) people who use 3rd grade tools like Eagle for doing their half-serious work. IMHO I'd rather stay away of such pain.
 
What I talk about: Cadstar video of their automatic shoving, dynamic continious DRC .. (PADS had those over 10 years... )
http://www.zuken.com/en/products/pcb-design/cadstar/resources/movies

PS: Before you say, .. yes.. even back then we had BGA.s, DDR memories and plenty tight bords that were totally impossible to autoroute. I wish I could show some of those thingies.

[Fsck]

Now, i have another question for the general audience here.
Here is something i have a hard time understanding. Most likely it is because i think differently, because i'm socially awkward, because i have fun with electronics as a hobby (i also enjoy scuba diving , and the beach and traveling and good food and all kinds of other stuff , but electronics is my prime hobby, followed by scuba diving and all the rest)

I am purely speaking as a hobbyist now ( forget for a moment that i also do electronics as a job. i am talking -hobby- now. leisure time. not-paid-for time )
i can understand that for a student a 1000$ program is a lot of money. heck i was also bitching in my student years why everything i wanted was expensive in relation to the amount of cash i had in my pocket.

here is the bit i'm having trouble with grasping:
an average student these days goes for a pint with his mates on Fridays , goes to the disco and spends money on hobbies. i see 18 and 19 year old kids that take off 3 weeks to party in Ibiza  ( if you are in Europe) or go on a 3 day spend oodles of cash spring break. Fine. I can understand that. They want to do that and are willing to spend money.

if you totalize the amount of cash spent on those leisures on a yearly basis you will end up well above the 1000$ cost of that program.
Now, if one of your leisure activities, things you derive enjoyment from, happens to be electronics. how come suddenly the program needs to be free. ?
I understand as a student you may have to juggle.
As an adult making money. there's people enjoying a good cigar. (in my view basically convert dollars into smoke ... but i don't judge. you enjoy it. no problem) or a good bottle of whiskey. (in my view converting cash into pee, but i don't judge, your leisure.) or going to the movie theaters. Paying 15$, or whatever it is these days, to watch something 1 time ( i'll wait until its on Netflix and watch it as many times i want).

You're forgetting the fact that if the price isn't low enough to be affordable, people will just pirate it.
ie matlab and hobbyists...

[David_AVD]

For the hobbyist market, they should develop something web based that PCB houses can deploy for themselves and be a one stop shop those that in reality only do something once or twice a year.

Arghh!!!! Noooooo....  Most web based applications suck.  I don't want to be tied to the availability of the Internet (in general) or some web server that may or may not be up.

[Fsck]

For the hobbyist market, they should develop something web based that PCB houses can deploy for themselves and be a one stop shop those that in reality only do something once or twice a year.

That would be a winner: for the hobbyist access to all features of the best without paying a dime for it; for the PCB house, pcb orders.

oh god no. most web-based things tend to be slow as crap and forget about 3D manipulation.

[Otatiaro]

Hello,

That is very interesting ... I evaluated AD some months ago and it was fantastic for the PCB design, but a bit too expensive.
If they strip everything not needed (FPGA, like Dave said, nobody uses AD, justo go with the vendor tools, etc) and focus on PCB design I'll buy one as soon as it is available if the price is decent (and probably multiple licences when my company will grow up ... one day ).

The 3D integration is awesome (I work with a designer for the cases of my products, I can send him the STEP file of the board with components, etc) ... PCB routing with interactive routing is the best I even used (did not try mentor or pads, etc ... I'm far from this budget). Etc.

I'm using a commercial licence of TASKING for ARM too so I hope they won't drop this product ...

Thomas.

[poorchava]

CadStar is powerful (actually the standard in my day job company, I'm not a PCB designer though) but cumbersome to use. Altium is much, much more user friendly and has way better interface.

I think they should sell the base for cheap ($100?) with possibility to enable certain options. Of course there would have to be a free trial period for each of them. Pretty much the same thing as in oscilloscope.

Want interactive routing? $20
Want 3d? $30
Want IPC footprint Wizard? $120
Want high speed routing? $200
Want >4 layer PCB (4 layers are now quite often used by hobbyists thanks to itead, elecrow and the like) - $400

current price of Altium is completly inadequate, because NOBODY will use all the features, and nobody wants to pay for stuff they don't use.

[AndyC_772]

For that price you can buy a 30-user license of Eagle.

Probably take that many seats to do the work of one AD seat

Agreed, it's a bit like saying you can buy 30 hacksaws for the price of a CNC mill. If all you need is a hacksaw, that's fine, otherwise it's completely useless.

I do wonder just how commercially attractive the hobby market is to a PCB software vendor. If I were doing a project purely for the fun of it, I might consider buying, say, a £200-£300 tool to get the job done - in much the same way as I might consider spending that much on a table saw, drill press or other more tangible piece of kit. It'll only get used once or twice a year, and at the end of the day, there's a limit to just how badly I really need that LED cube, bat detector or bbq temperature logger.

It's judging the feature set for the ultra-cheap version that I think would be most challenging... you need to still have a tool which is usable, but not one which is going to steal sales of the four-figure version that companies who regularly design PCBs have to buy.

You can ditch everything to do with length matching, differential pairs, impedance control and the like for starters. Same goes for anything you have to support collaboration, database integration and version control, and any time saving features like placement replication. But what then? How many layers? What board size? Any limit on pin count or net list complexity? It's a tough call.

[DutchGert]

Only thing they have to do now is read this topic, have a meeting or two and make up there mind.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Whoa. Hold it. that is NOT what Altium does!. If you stop paying subscription the software is frozen at that point in time. You get no more updates, no more access to the help desk and no access to the wiki , the library vaults.

No access to the wiki ? seriously? That's just petty & dumb
At least if they do get it right with a low-endfree model,  people will create free online help and probably an independent forum for themselves to bypass any silliness like that.

..and I totally agree that no subscription based model (i.e. stops working after expiry) is ever acceptable. I would never consider anything that worked like this - it's just too big a risk.
I also have a problem with having to pay subscription for bugfixes - new features, fine, but not bugfixes for existing features.
They could manage this by having new features controlled by license keys, so you can always get the latest version, but have to either be on maintainance or pay a 1-off to get new features.
 

[DutchGert]

Whoa. Hold it. that is NOT what Altium does!. If you stop paying subscription the software is frozen at that point in time. You get no more updates, no more access to the help desk and no access to the wiki , the library vaults.

No access to the wiki ? seriously? That's just petty & dumb
At least if they do get it right with a low-endfree model,  people will create free online help and probably an independent forum for themselves to bypass any silliness like that.

..and I totally agree that no subscription based model (i.e. stops working after expiry) is ever acceptable. I would never consider anything that worked like this - it's just too big a risk.
I also have a problem with having to pay subscription for bugfixes - new features, fine, but not bugfixes for existing features.
They could manage this by having new features controlled by license keys, so you can always get the latest version, but have to either be on maintainance or pay a 1-off to get new features.
 

U can always access the Wiki, it's free for everyone.

[EEVblog]

want fpga,ip cores and compilers? add 2K

Yeah but then nobody would buy that option.
They must flog it off with something else everyone wants so they can say 'Look! The FPGA module is selling like hotcakes! It wasn't such a brain dead idea after all." 

That is exactly the reason that quite some time back Altium moved to the "All you can eat" deal and (as mentioned in the video) actually made PCB "optional extra".
The basic version only came with schematic and embedded/FPGA, in order to push their FPGA hardware dream.
To get PCB to you had to pay top dollar. Of course, practically 100% of people needed the PCB, so they were forced to pay top dollar. I also meant that management could no longer see who was using just PCB/schematic and who was using the embedded stuff. So internally, and externally for marketing, they could say that everyone was buying into the FPGA vision. It's was actually a very clever move from that aspect.
Of course they have now admitted that (well) over 90% of the business is PCB.

[hikariuk]

Maybe I don't see it on their site, but I don't see a price or even an option for a student edition of their software.

You have to ask.
IIRC it was about $100 a year for the full version.

I suspect that's just available to actual schools and students, not people teaching themselves at home?

[andtfoot]

*snip* But, when it comes to this 1000$ piece of code *snip*

Maybe I'm missing some context here, but from what I can find a single seat at the moment would cost me close to $8000.

If it were $1000, chances are I would have bought it already (after having a serious thinking). If it were half that, I would probably forget the thinking part.

[Fsck]

Maybe I don't see it on their site, but I don't see a price or even an option for a student edition of their software.

You have to ask.
IIRC it was about $100 a year for the full version.

I suspect that's just available to actual schools and students, not people teaching themselves at home?

Correct. However, "student" prices tend to be faculty/department-independent

[jancumps]

I've submitted a poll thread fo this question:

How many of us purchased a PCB tool specific for hobby/non-commercial use?

[bookaboo]

Forgive me but I haven't had a chance to watch the vid and have only skimmed the thread (I'm at work and will be looking at details later).

Quick Question:
Will any low cost version be able to read in old files from (don't laugh) Protel '98?
I have a bunch of *sch and *.pcb files that I really wish I could access again.

[hli]

... But give us a decent board size, even if it requires upgrade to a $100-200 version from the free one. Making the next step $1200 is just stupid. To only have the options ot 160mmx80mm or 4000mmx4000mm is stupid. .

Actually there is something in between - its called the EAGLE Hobbyist version. Its $169 for a 160x100mm board size. it requires filling out  (and signing) a form for them, though.

[poorchava]

Eagle is SHIT and - sorry for being rude - anyone who pays any money for Eagle is an idiot. Whatever you can do with paid Eagle you can also do with free KiCad (or Inkscape...). If you have to - go for DipTrace - it's currently closest to being decent pcb tool at an affordable price.

[c4757p]

Whatever you can do with paid Eagle you can also do with free KiCad (or Inkscape...).

I don't like using Eagle because the workflow and general layout of the software makes me feel like I need a drool napkin... but in terms of what it's actually capable of, no, it definitely has at least a few somewhat nice features (I've been begging for import of DRC rules and Gerber export settings from a file in KiCad for ages......) and is generally less buggy IMHO.