Non-specific CAD/EDA angst - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: grouchobyte
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 14, 2016, 11:41:31 pm
content: Over the last few decades I have used......Orcad for schematics and layoutPADs for layoutProtel 98 and 99SE for schematic and layoutAltium Designer summer 09...both for schematic and layoutCadence Concept and Allegro APDMentor BoardStation and DX designerAnd now Eagle 6.5 and 7.3 proFrankly they all suck and are constantly being bloated with new functionality including bugs and work-arounds.In a perfect world and going back to what I recall were the best tools, I would have to say, PADs for layout and Orcad for schematics......although they were never meant for each other so the ECO process is like towing a car with a bungy cordAltium does schematics well but the bloat that goes with it is enormous and unecessarily slow.The file structure is also retarded and the seat cost for a single user is a ripoff.Cadence and Mentor stuff is just too expensive and they really want to sell you a mortgage to support you.Eagle is very useful and compact with great support, but unless you like re-learning the english language everytime you sit in front of it, it wears you down.Kickad and Diptrace are also not ready in one way or another and are good if you want something quasi-professional, but not really reliable in the long termMy sincere hope before I die is that the EDA industry stop drinking spiked koolaid, smoking pot, breathing their own air and just LISTEN to the users......bring out a whip and use it on the software developers and create a tool to that gets the job done without a steep learning curve, has simple licencing, a scaled cost model, little bloat, multiplatform compatibility, open source scripting functionality like Eagle's ULPs, intuitive libraries and a simple symbol and footprint editor, component partners like digikey mouser, etc and reasonable accessible support when all else fails. Leave out the bloat and dont even try to make the worlds' best autorouter.I can dream, can't I?Autodesk, are you listening?@grouchobyte

author: Aodhan145
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 14, 2016, 11:53:51 pm
content: They are just tools, all tools when you spend hours using them start to piss you off.

author: grouchobyte
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2016, 01:18:51 am
content: Quote from: Aodhan145 on August 14, 2016, 11:53:51 pmTrue. But unless you have little passion for getting a design done efficiently and have a high tolerance for abuse you will be pissed all the time using something as satisfying as consuming human excrement yet marketed as "gold" by some group of marketing MBA or bean counter wanksAnd thats putting it mildly...@GROUCH-o-byte

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 15, 2016, 01:37:43 am
content: I can't speak directly to the software being discussed - but I can offer this one observation:For most software, the correlation between price and functionality/ease of use is no accident.

author: Aodhan145
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2016, 11:48:56 am
content: Quote from: grouchobyte on August 15, 2016, 01:18:51 amYeah im not saying they can't be improved (they really can), I was just stating that nothing can be perfect and stress free.

author: Gribo
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2016, 03:16:01 pm
content: Linux (And other OSes) had legions of programmers, managers and designers working on every aspect of the product for the last 25 years. How many programmers the EDA vendors have combined? I agree there should be better interoperability and better standards, but I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 15, 2016, 03:42:15 pm
content: While I agree, some takes on why it isn't happening:Quote from: evb149 on August 15, 2016, 01:12:05 amThere's a serious lack of standard for that, and none is going to happen without a large number of major vendors working on it together, and due to existing commercial interests it would be incredible to get those companies to join efforts.Several tools actually attempt to integrate all design aspects, but they're only managing a "meh" result at it despite great costs.Quote from: evb149 on August 15, 2016, 01:12:05 amBecause the tools used for that have been made by the programmers for their own use. They knew what they were going to work on would become a big mess rather quick without appropriate tools of which there were none yet, so they stopped there, developed a bunch of separate little tools that would work together to make things easier, then once that was done went back onto the main project.Given that this all happened in a pretty restricted "homebrew computing" circle and that the mindset in there was by definition very open once there was something it was easily adopted.That badly translates in the EDA world becasue:- There are already tons of tools and established relationships with commercial interests so starting one from scratch is only mildly interesting, and it would be very hard to attract enough people to it until it's reached a very high level (i.e. years of work with no returns and no guarantee of success even then)- They're complex tools, not easy to break down in small pieces that all have a purpose on their own- People who develop the tools and should be populating the tools' databases are not the end users, and they don't see that as their business that much. Less incentive to do a good job.- They might see it as their business, but given the number and diversity of tools it's just too much effort for the return. I'm sure if there was ONE great EDA package that was strongly dominant manufacturers would make part models, but they don't want to do the job 10 times.Quote from: evb149 on August 15, 2016, 01:12:05 amWell, you just threw a big rant about how boring that is. Now think again about who would really like to be doing that all day...It seems that for this to happen a "neutral" new player should get on working to develop that great platform that is able to do it all, demonstrate its capabilities, and work a lot to get vendors onboard. The problem is:- Either you make something on the open source / Linux model, but it will take 20 years to have something decent... IF you can find people to do the job. Again, on linux it's software programmers developing their software programming tools, here you'd need electronics designers who also happen to be able to program their EDA tools - no way the same dynamic can ever exist.- Or you make it a commercial venture, but again there will be so much investment needed to get it to a point where it really makes a difference that nobody will be able to afford it.And in the end...Quote from: evb149 on August 15, 2016, 01:12:05 amTo be fair, if everything was as perfect as you describe it should be you'd probably be out of a job because anyone could spend half an hour entering the specs, hit a button, answer a couple of questions and have a BOM, PCB design and software ready an hour later...

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2016, 04:46:28 pm
content: Quote from: Brumby on August 15, 2016, 01:37:43 amYou mean that there isn't one, or that it's negative?It's been my limited experience that quality tracks with number of users, regardless of product cost.Some of the most exquisitely crafted software is absolutely, positively free-as-in-air, looks great, and works intuitively. Chrome and Firefox for example, open software, free, used by millions.(And mind, I mean "exquisite" in a relative sense, as these examples are by no means blameless. I don't think even mission-critical software is truly blameless, but at least it's had a whole heck of a lot more review-per-LOC. Anyway, in that case, the blame shifts more to a poorly conceived specification, where it can be very difficult indeed to change something that gets locked into the design very early on, even when it sucks.)---More broadly, I think people generally have an expectation that engineering services are difficult. Or more general still, professional services are.I don't at all find what I do difficult. I like a challenge. The nuts and bolts of synthesizing a design is easy. The main difficulty is pulling together enough (often incomplete and disparate) data to complete a task. I have quite a lot of experience, so I can fill in much of that by assumption, until better data arrives. That part will elude computers for quite some time, so that's fine by me.The rest I think is entirely self imposed, for better or worse.I think people, within the engineering field, think that their jobshouldbe hard, so they make it hard for themselves, and for others.A very basic example: peoplestillusing ALL_CAPS_NAMES_WITH_UNDERSCORES.TXT, even though we're well past the days of Long Filenames. (I try to use "Pleasing Descriptive Titles.doc" when I name files and projects. It has yet to cause a problem.)We're even entering the era of Unicode support, though that will takevery long indeedto filter down through the EDA giants. It's been a decade and AltiumSTILLhasn't fixed Bug #2373: "Diameter Dimension symbol shows as ':' in PDF", apparently a language vs. PDF encoding bug!For the worse, self-imposed difficulty means more cost to the customer. If it's competitive, companies will try to remove that waste -- at least, if it's worthwhile to do so. Maybe it's not worthwhile. Obviously, no one's paying EDA companies for enough improvement to achieve that (but, maybe they are, and the actually-good, intuitive, instantly useful software is all in the five-digit range.. I don't know nearly enough about those products to say).Maybe they're just too complex to use, at least by very many people (for all of the reasons evb149 talked about: there has to be some framework or data structure, to express all the specifications and constraints a design depends on, and laying all that out is even more complex than what we have already!), and so not only is it very difficult to write such a program, but it's inherently difficult to use (no matter how much time is spent making it intuitive), and very few people will be able to use it, let alone afford to use it.For the better (well, to some), self-imposed difficulty means more revenue to the designer. If it's not competitive enough (say because quantities are small enough -- after all, design is an individual act of creation; there's only so much you can automate or reuse, and often with legal motivation because of assigned IP rights!), then there's no point in trying to remove that waste (i.e., it costs more to fix it, no matter how you amortize the cost). You might as well charge your customer as much as you can, if they're willing to pay for it.Likely, this is true in most professions. Law is a hugely deep morass of accumulated rules, cases, traditions and methods. Especially here in the US, where a given case potentially depends upon the entire case history of the country (precedents). (Of course, practically, cases are only considered within their subject area, since cross-referencing the entire history, everywhere, is impossible. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if there are cases where disparate areas of law come together to reach an unexpected verdict.)Surely, a huge amount of law could be automated: even if we don't have a good way to express or implement the translation, from a legal phrase, into what class of objects and relationships (in the real world) are actually affected by it; we should still be able to express the simple(?) algebra of those statements, and compile or synthesize them into, say, automatically generated tax codes, or health care insurance schedules, or criminal prosecutions and sentences, or etc.I guess some lawyers have at least adopted some software development tools, but AFAIK, that's only assisting the production of documents; the documents themselves still have to be legalese, human-readable (heh, such that it is..), and, ultimately, read and interpreted by human eyes.---It occurred to me, recently, that a lot of custom engineering design companies produce complete CAD files for their products. And it occurred to me, WHY?! Take, for example, a one-off production line component, a jig or test fixture or something like that. It's got a base, frame, some moving parts, etc. It's only ever made once, or a few times. It's imprecise, capable of being designed on-the-fly by hacking pieces together (often, such designs might be hacked in the shop, then documented in CAD, after the fact). Or the precise parts (like the registration pins and pogo board in a test jig) are done real quick on a CNC, and everything else is done around that.Where is the value-add in using CAD tools for such a thing?If you're making one of something, and it can be filed out of a block of material in less time than it takes to draw and print it, why not let that be that? Maybe make a napkin-level sketch, just to have it documented.It certainly helps with consistency and documentation, so that there's a record of it, and if more parts ever need to be made, they can be reproduced quickly and precisely. At what quantity does this become value-add? Is it truly 1? Is it 10? 5? 100?I'm not saying everyone should rush out to the shop and cut things free-hand just because they need less than three of them... I'm just making the observation that, by enforcing one consistency (everything in CAD), it shows an inconsistency in the absolute optimization of the system as a whole.A cost-motivated shop could insist that, for any part with chalk-line tolerances and single digit quantities, it should be made, and documented, as quickly and as crudely as suits the part. Yet, implementing such a rule would probably end up costing as much (which is to say, not much, because we're talking something simple here), just because it's yet one more rule to learn!Tim

author: grouchobyte
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 15, 2016, 06:33:02 pm
content: As always, Tim, thanks for your insightful thoughts on the subject!I want to first apologize for my rant on this but it really irks me in this day and age that we EE's can't get a nice CAD package like the ME community have(ie: solidworks and pro-e)Our design tools are powerful but not always intuitive and at my age I grow tired of learning where the important stuff is and how to use it without error and frustration. I want, and I assume other do as well, to focus on design and not driving the tool with ut-ohs and gotchas forgotten from the last time you had it out for a spin.We are a smart bunch overall, responsible for putting a man on the moon and inventing the internet ( sorry Al). Why in the hell can't we come together and start voting with our checkbooksHowever, its a sad state of affairs and need not be that way. The thought of learning new tools or features at my senior age does give me angst when I think about it.@grouchobyte

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 15, 2016, 06:51:21 pm
content: Quote from: grouchobyte on August 15, 2016, 06:33:02 pmThat I believe there is no way around, any tool with a large amount of possibilities will always require learning and getting used to.That's simply due to the diversity in how those meatbags think... very apparent on a product I work on, for some it's the best thing since sliced bread and the most intuitive offering in the industry, and to some it's an insanely complex and illogical thing they will never be able to wrap their head around. Well... that's how it is I'm afraid.Someone could make the thing you dream of, but it might work in a way that's just as painful to you. You might make it yourself the way you think it should be, and others would complain they don't understand a thing.That's why I believe most software nowadays targets kind of a middle ground, and instead of favoring either "people type X" or "people type Y" and letting the other be completely off they simply follow long-standing software concepts that everyone has now kinda gotten used to during decades, and that everybody can grab with a bit of effort.Quote from: grouchobyte on August 15, 2016, 06:33:02 pmWell... your concept would certainly result in a new tool, that you'd have to learnThat's perpetual movement.