Circuit Studio Dead? (again!)

[johnboxall]

Some of us know what is going on due to being on the beta, but can't post publicly about it.

Perhaps someone can anonymously fill us in?

[Dubbie]

I'm not going to say anything about the Beta, but I will say this.

I have switched to KiCAD. I did one project in it, using it for the first time in my life. It didn't really take me much longer than it would have in Circuit Studio. I had to google a couple of things, but the resulting board worked out great. I am a big believer in making sure I have an accurate 3D model for every board I make. The 3D model also worked out great. It was just a basic 4 layer simple board, but i have no reason to doubt that bigger more complex jobs could be done with ease.

So I am never looking back from KiCAD.

Make from that what you will!

[voltsandjolts]

I bet your NDA will expire before the next version of CircuitStudio is released

While CircuitStudio is useable and could have been used for Dubbie's board above, I agree that KiCAD is the future, both for hobbyists and small companies. Altium really dropped the ball with CS, they clearly have no interest in it. Failing to provide even small updates to fix minor things is inexcusable, shame on you Altium. I guess they didn't see a quick return on investment and instead of taking a long term strategic view they just canned it and moved on to milking AD customers (like me) all the more.

[trevwhite]

A while back I spoke with tech support regarding something concerning Altium Designer. I mentioned Circuit Studio and tech support firmly distanced themselves from it saying they had no interaction with it. It was not treated as an Altium product the way tech support reacted. They were firmly all about Altium Designer. I believe originally CS was a version of AD that was forked and then adapted to create Circuit Studio. This was before AD code was ported. Maybe that became a big problem? No way to share features properly when CS was based on a old version of AD.

I like Designer but the whole experience of starting with CS and being treated so badly stuck with me. Along with the constant marketting and now changed subscription model, I never really feel like I can trust Altium as a company. Before CS I used EasyPC for years and the business model was totally stable. Every year they release a new version and you pay to upgrade. If you skip a year, no problem you do not have to pay a fortune to bring your version up to date. I started using EasyPC when it was on v5. It is now on v26 and the company has been totally stable in all that time. I know exactly what kind of company I am dealing with.

I have been keeping an eye on Kicad and even if CS came out with a new version I would find it very difficult to now recommend anyone try it just because of how badly the company has treated the community over the years. I have no trust in them really.

[EEVblog]

A while back I spoke with tech support regarding something concerning Altium Designer. I mentioned Circuit Studio and tech support firmly distanced themselves from it saying they had no interaction with it. It was not treated as an Altium product the way tech support reacted. They were firmly all about Altium Designer. I believe originally CS was a version of AD that was forked and then adapted to create Circuit Studio. This was before AD code was ported. Maybe that became a big problem? No way to share features properly when CS was based on a old version of AD.

Altium flat out said it was at the time didn't they?
It was not an Altium driven product, but was a result of a request from Element 14 for a PCB package they could sell (and sell exclusively?).

[2N3055]

https://resources.altium.com/p/coming-soon-altium-circuitmaker-pro

It was rebranded CircuitMaker PRO, based on new binary base of new Altium..
It went into the Beta...

What happened on the way, it's anybody's guess..

[IanJ]

It was rebranded CircuitMaker PRO, based on new binary base of new Altium..
It went into the Beta...

And it changed a LOT!.......
CS was pretty close to being a good product, just needed the bugs taken out of it and the workflow tweaked IMHO.
CMPro rolled the clock back months/years......unfortunately!

At which point I jumped over to KiCad.

Ian.

[2N3055]

It was rebranded CircuitMaker PRO, based on new binary base of new Altium..
It went into the Beta...

And it changed a LOT!.......
CS was pretty close to being a good product, just needed the bugs taken out of it and the workflow tweaked IMHO.
CMPro rolled the clock back months/years......unfortunately!

At which point I jumped over to KiCad.

Ian.

I gave up much sooner than you....

[voltsandjolts]

It was not an Altium driven product, but was a result of a request from Element 14 for a PCB package they could sell (and sell exclusively?).

It was clear that Farnell lost interest some years ago when they made the one-and-only E14 tech support guy redundent - and he was genuinely helpful. They felt they weren't making money on it, and any developments payments to Altium for CS were sunk. But Altium had a choice here; they had the option of stepping up to help _their_ end users by doing minimal bugs fixes and adding a feature (find similar objects) to make CS a competetive mid-range ECAD solution. Instead they seem to have plouged effort into the failed CS Pro and produced no updates for CS, not even a yearly bug fix to give people hope. Crazy because with a few simple changes CS could have been quite good.

CS was pretty close to being a good product, just needed the bugs taken out of it and the workflow tweaked IMHO.

Yup, although workflow was OK IMO (it's the Altium workflow).

[PlainName]

Maybe they figured the CS was good enough and cheap enough to take sales away from AD.

[Bud]

, just needed the bugs taken out of it

Not a strong part of Altium support 

[EEVblog]

Maybe they figured the CS was good enough and cheap enough to take sales away from AD.

I don't know why they still advertise it on the website in the main product drop down?
I've got a lifetime license to 1.5.2 and it hasn't changed or been updated since I installed it several years ago.

[tooki]

FFS, I wish they’d just give non-commercial users a free or very cheap license to the full Altium, at most  disabling some of the most advanced features. It’s not like it’d lose them a cent of revenue, given that hobbyists aren’t going to shell out for a license either way. But making it unapproachable means they defect to KiCad instead. And if they then go commercial, they’ll keep using that…

[JohanH]

A bit unrelated (as I don't know Circuit Studio), but I'm convinced the final solution for any software that isn't niche, is open sourcing. At my $day_job, our own (proprietary) software is very long-lived and it isn't unheard of that we patch a twenty year old product that is basically dead and buried, but some customer is still using and asks for a solution for a particular issue. Now there was a third party software component that we were dependent on for building our software. After about ten years the company owning the particular piece of software was acquired by a bigger company, then this software product sold off to another, even bigger competitor and quickly closed down. So they bought it to kill the competitor. Now what to do with all our software? We began porting this part to existing open source software that many big vendors use (even Microsoft). Now we use this open source component and have mostly gotten rid of the dead software piece.

That said, personally as a hobbyist I use KiCad and nothing else. I've lived through the history of open source and all the biggest companies in the world (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, you name it) are now using and developing open source software and pouring $M into it. Niche software are still proprietary, but open source is the solution for preserving human knowledge. Otherwise we just end up with dead branches of software, with decades worth of development just wasted. And all have to be repeated again by a new company. Think about all the human mind processing that has gone into creating these fantastic pieces of software and just thrown away, because some company got bought, or got bankrupt. If companies have any decency at all, if they can't sell their software, please open source it instead of letting it rot in some corner.

[PlainName]

all the biggest companies in the world (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, you name it) are now using and developing open source software and pouring $M into it.

With no ulterior motive? I don't think they are doing it for kindness.

but open source is the solution for preserving human knowledge. Otherwise we just end up with dead branches of software, with decades worth of development just wasted.

That's the end-user view, sure. But for the producer, what do they care about preservation or whether it will still be around in 20 years (unless it's their pension)? So long as it sells now they would be fine with it, and if they can monetise it some more in a few years, all the better. Open source isn't likely to give them that.

It's a noble game, but you have to face facts that open source costs someone in some way. Either it's a sideline from their day job or it's a loss-leader for some other payment scheme. There are a few OS products I follow and I notice that they start off purely free everything with grand aims, then they get more 'professional' with (mostly) a better product, and then they hive off features to paid 'VIP' punters, and if they're lucky they get bought out by a company that kind of mostly keeps the 'community' version, often grudgingly. Except when they get forked and split the user base, then each fork either goes this way or stagnates.

In general - there are some exceptions

Microsoft uses open source to wash their reputation a bit cleaner, and also because they want (need) eyeballs. WSL isn't there because they suddenly became Linux and OS fanatics but to reduce the stampede away from W10. And try not to have people remember they think Linux is a virus. Google Amazon took over FreeRTOS because they wanted the developers to use their IoT scheme (from which they can increase the amount of data they suck). Etc.

[edit: brain fade - Amazon grabbed FreeRTOS. Not that Google are much different, of course.]

[JohanH]

With no ulterior motive? I don't think they are doing it for kindness.

Of course not, who said that? It's all the infrastructure that benefits, cloud servers etc. Practically everything runs Linux, containers and various software stacks that are open source. It's not free, you still have to maintain, patch and develop. But the enormous mass of building blocks is there and it's cost saving.

[PlainName]

It's all the infrastructure that benefits, cloud servers etc

Quite. They get people with OS ideals in their eyes to pay the businesses costs. What's not to like!

[EEVblog]

FFS, I wish they’d just give non-commercial users a free or very cheap license to the full Altium, at most  disabling some of the most advanced features. It’s not like it’d lose them a cent of revenue, given that hobbyists aren’t going to shell out for a license either way. But making it unapproachable means they defect to KiCad instead. And if they then go commercial, they’ll keep using that…

Either that or just make Circuit Studio free and put a few programmers on it. Heck, having worked there I can say that one programmer would be enough.
Such an idea sounds stupid to many, but Altium is practically built on stupid ideas. I was there when they slashed the price of Altium Designer by 80%, and when they made the PCB module optional extra.

I've heard that Circuit Maker has a lot of users, but I strangely don't know any of them nor hear anything about it, might as well be dead as far as industry/hobby talk goes. Same with the other web based solutions.
The chatter is now 95% KiCad, with a smattering of DIPtrace and Eagle.

It would not be silly for Altium to become a one produict company, Altium Designers, just with different user tiers. But that doesn't look good on the yearly shareholder report, you can't have pretty pyramid product charts.

[2x2l]

I was on the CS/CMPro beta for a couple of years......I came off it a few months ago after I got fed up. I gave Altium a closing report when I left.
I switched to KiCad when V6 came out. I haven't looked back.

Ian.

I was looking for an upgrade to gain post-routing signal integrity with Altium/Orcad Pro/eCadStar, but it's *really* expensive.
May I should switch on Kicad/Qucs/LTSpice/... and spend the money on hardware?

Because AFAIK Eagle/AltiumCS/AltiumCM offer nothing more than Kicad?

Spend the money on HW, as in rather than get SI simulation software, you'll just layout the board with TPs,have an assembly house do a one-off run, then use actual probing hardware to capture eye-diagrams and envelopes?

I'm not sure what specifically you're looking at re: PCB SI (LVDS? CLK distribution? S21?) or if you want other features (PDN?) but imo it's really Cadence (Orcad) is basically king of the mountain. It'll work with ANSYS HFSS and their whole EM suite. Or like, basically every other sim software out there, despite having their own Sigrity software (vendors would go out of their way to lock you into their physics package if they, themselves, were selling one).

License seats are expensive, and you're using an ancient TK-based scripting language code base, but you'll be able to call in and get an English speaking rep who will walk you through what you need, and won't cockblock your access to an actual developer. Within 40 hours (which is not much time at all, if you're moving to an entire new package and sim-platform) you'll be up and running. Also, they're pretty flexible with bundling (say, discounts if you want to have a Sigrity license tossed in). Hell, I haven't talked to sales in a long time, but you could just flat out say something like -- listen, I need __ __ and __, can you just set up a VM on Amazon with a 14 day seat so I can see if it fits my needs?

Also, back on topic, CS was so great and ugh. Eagle 7 was great too but I refuse to buy anything that involves recurring subscriptions. I give you money, you give me some bytes that I copy onto my hard disk and I use until you develop features I find merit paying you more money for. Transaction completed. I don't want to have to have a "cloud account" or whatever in order to load your software. I don't want to risk some hidden legalese in the EULA allowing for  "security updates" which are "required" and bundled with them obligatory auto-updates (a la Chrome/Firefox on load), which will effectively take control of the full binary. If I can't take a HDD snapshot of my install, make a VMware* image out of a fully-offline compatible piece of software I've licensed, you're eliminating my ability to future-proof/revise old designs.

Finally, if you know specifically what you're looking at, there are physics packages like FreeFEM which will get you 90% of the way there. Again, since I don't know the details of your problem I can't point you to any specific module. There's a good chance you don't know what your problem is to begin with (I mean, cmon, EEs ideally should think of everything at the PDE/Maxwells eq level, but if you're like me, you don't- so you don't know which one of the 50 modules to pick which will ultimately solve, given the proper initial/boundary conditions, your issue--which is why I suspect ANSYS can get away with charging what they do (solving PDEs that can be represented in 4 lines of scipy). I digress.

My issue with all of these packages are they're just like a gas. As computational/rendering resources get cheaper ("the room gets bigger"), the overhead of these packages get larger (the engineers care less of performance optimizations, "hey what's 10k cycles versus 2k cycles when we have Intel I9s" so the 'gas spreads out'). KiCad and Altium both have this problem- try the following. Layout a Zync + memories + a PDN and some trivial peripherals like HDMI out. The only other constraints are you gotta keep full DRC compliance according to the Zync sheet-- so length-match all those traces, ensure your termination resistors are all there. See how fucking slow Altium is compared to Cadence. KiCad just crashes when I try to move a memory bank's /16 or whatever on top of a pre-existing component. Cadence is worth it just for the data-sheet OCR import library tool and the 'maintain a consistent length by serpentine routing' tool (though maybe Altium has that? Not sure, haven't used it in ages)

*VMware price-gouges almost at the Oracle level for their enterprise software, but VMWare Workstation Pro since v9 has done what I have paid for it to do without any of that license fuckery. They've built up sufficient credibility IMO that I don't worry about that shit

[IanJ]

Hi all,

My timeline says it all....

Pre 2016 = Long time Eagle user.
July 2016 = Got the first version of CS, the free trial (eventually bought a license).
Sept. 2016 = Signed the NDA to join the CS BETA group.
Sept. 2020 = Migrated to the CMPro BETA group.
Jan. 2022 = Left the CMPro BETA group.
Jan. 2022 = Installed V6 KiCad.

If they gave me a free lifetime license and upgrades for Alltium Designer I'd say no thanks!

Ian.

[EE-digger]

Best news ever this morning.  James Harriman from Altium posted on the newark/element14/farnell CS forum that as of Jan 1, 2023, these guys are gone.  Thank God.  Newark is still ok IF they have a part in stock but are useless for any problems that arise.  Certainly NOT set up to sell and support software packages.

There are links directly to the Altium site now as well as to the Altium forums.

Hopefully other good things happen along with this !

As to why CS doesn't have a better standing?  You can thank the Newark connection for that.  Their CS forum is 99.99% orphaned but thanks to CS users, many are helped with their problems.  This boost directly from Altium is the best thing that could happen.

Remaining question ... is there a Santa?

[negativ3]

The last thing to go is hope. Altium have had enough good will.

[nctnico]

I was on the CS/CMPro beta for a couple of years......I came off it a few months ago after I got fed up. I gave Altium a closing report when I left.
I switched to KiCad when V6 came out. I haven't looked back.

Ian.

I was looking for an upgrade to gain post-routing signal integrity with Altium/Orcad Pro/eCadStar, but it's *really* expensive.
May I should switch on Kicad/Qucs/LTSpice/... and spend the money on hardware?

Because AFAIK Eagle/AltiumCS/AltiumCM offer nothing more than Kicad?

Spend the money on HW, as in rather than get SI simulation software, you'll just layout the board with TPs,have an assembly house do a one-off run, then use actual probing hardware to capture eye-diagrams and envelopes?

Not a good idea indeed. First of all you won't be able to actually measure all signals. Try to get a 1600MHz DDR4 bus into an oscilloscope properly without disturbing the bus itself. The scope alone will cost more than Orcad which has impedance / crosstalk simulation included. The second problem is that you'll need to do an expensive board respin to fix the problems and pray you didn't introduce new problems.

I'm using Orcad for doing high speed designs and the impedance / crosstalk simulation saves a lot of time.

[2x2l]

Not a good idea indeed. First of all you won't be able to actually measure all signals. Try to get a 1600MHz DDR4 bus into an oscilloscope properly without disturbing the bus itself. The scope alone will cost more than Orcad which has impedance / crosstalk simulation included. The second problem is that you'll need to do an expensive board respin to fix the problems and pray you didn't introduce new problems.

I'm using Orcad for doing high speed designs and the impedance / crosstalk simulation saves a lot of time.

Sorry, I was rambling on in that other post - you and I are in agreement I think. My ultimate point was "Cadence is worth it just for the data-sheet OCR import library tool and the 'maintain a consistent length by serpentine routing' tool".. Altium should just buy the good will of the people and throw CS up on Github- its a sunk cost anyways and it won't eat into Designer

The OrCAD simtool will generate data basically on par with going the PBRS/BERT route.(generating a PBRS from the scope itself, into an SMA port, reading out the signal via a LVDS* probe or an SMA-out. You'll then have to use an aux BERT comms tester and pay like 1k to "unlock that feature[/b]" on your scope. ANSYS (in my limited experience..I'm clearly not an EM pro sadly) will give you better models (like...more than just an eye-diagram and seeing what some pre-emphasis will do).

If you want to test actual data, bit for bit yeah you're definitely right..but, again, if you have to hit those SI numbers, your product's development costs should be able to afford that kind of kit (NRE costs recovered by volume, or the customer project is specific enough to demand that kind of performance that you can pass the buck onto them). At the EMI EMC compliance (not sim, live testing Bill O'Reilly style), you're going to have to actually separately test with an h-probe in the anecholic chamber. The SIM sotware will get you there for most digital stuff but if you hit any sort of wall and have no EM expert on your team, just pay a consult to come in and identify what's causing the problems.

Eithe rway, we're pretty much on Cadence being far superior to Altium or KiCad for this kinda junk. Off topic but does anyone have any experience with HyperLynx or other EDAs, especially with regards to mixed-signal work. Also, other than ADS what do people use to design AFEs for active probes? Like GaAs or SiGe process type stuff. I'm almost certainly never going to do anything along the lines of that work, but reading a few app notes would be fun


* Looks like Tek has a nice probe which is real-time in the 8k range, that's around one puff. The Lecroy WavePro were super expensive in the early 2000s which had real good dynamic range of +/- 8v (not that important for what we're talking about), with only 0.7 pf of loading (much more important)

[satoshi]

I am still unclear whether I should get Circuit Studio. It is selling at Newark for $495. (version 1.5 I think)
I have several years experience with Protel and Altium.
Or should I go with Diptrace?

Do it, 495$ is literally nothing for a software nowadays. I've done amassing designs with it. You can also always have the door open to the full Altium if you start making more money.