Is Altium total crap or what? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: TSR
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 07:13:41 am
content: Dear All,Just so you know, I'm venting. The alternative is throwing something at my screen, but that gets expensive.So, here we go....I've been using Altium for going on 9 years and while it has an easier interface than Cadence or (de)Mentor, it has so many bugs, year after year after year after year, that it makes me puke.Here's my latest discovery (see screen shot below): When routing a trace some genius at Altium decided that it was OK to place the trace off-grid. Not by something visible, say half a mil, but by some infinitesimal amount (in this case 1/1000 of a mil) so that you can't see it, but it won't fit, or shift itself, between two other traces that have the proper clearance to let it through.So my question is:WHO IS THE FUCKING MORON AT ALTIUM WHO PROGRAMMED THIS SHIT?!?Honestly. I understand that software "engineers" are not particularly gifted people. They chose software because hardware is hard and they simply didn't have the brains for it. So they start work for places like Altium or Microsoft and they have no idea that their sub-standard IQ results in hours upon hours of totally wasted time by others who take their jobs seriously.I would estimate that in the past 9 years I have spent no less that 500 man-hours chasing down and going around idiotic Altium bugs (for this one I have to manually move the trace 1/1000 mil over so it's on-grid and fits between the other two traces that are also on-grid). Take my experience and multiply it by the hundreds of people using this crap software and you have some serious wasted time, money, nerves, etc. All because some little twit at Altium didn't bother to do the job right.If we extrapolate to all software we're talking about billions, yes billions, of wasted man-hours spent fixing some little idiot's mistake. This is literally hundreds of billions of wasted dollars, but strangely not a single article about it in the WSJ, NYT, etc.Now I'm sure there are real software engineers out there, people who earned the title "engineer", people who do the job right, people who also pull their hair out chasing down and fixing the idiocies of their co-workers - but you know what, they are a minority in their field. For the most part programmers are fucking morons. Morons who cost the rest of us a lot of money and a lot of time .... including that wasted on this post.Ok, there, all better. Thank you EEVblog for the free therapy.....now back to Altium....

author: voltsandjolts
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 07:22:39 am
content: Yeh, but sometimes it's better to stick with the devil you know.

author: nigelwright7557
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 07:59:00 am
content: PCB CAD software can be highly complex.At the end of routing a pcb then DRC must be done to to make sure nothing is wrong.Have you been in touch with Altium ?Some software vendors go out of their way to help.

author: Shonky
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 10:27:17 am
content: Annoying but at least you're perfect.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 10:41:31 am
content: Altium is not perfect, it's just the best we have.Maybe one day the developers of one of the free PCB design packages will wake up and realize the truth.....That instead of building their free PCB design package with a custom mouse/kbd interface with custom hotkeys and custom UI, they should instead be exactly duplicating how Altium's works, so every Altium user can use their PCB design software without having to unlearn and relearn everything.That will be a good day. but that day is not today.

author: blackdog
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 11:06:59 am
content: Hi,TSR i feel your pain...Not about Altium but software in measurement instruments and there conctrol software, even from wel known companies you wil find al lot of horror.Last week i returnd a Rigol DP2000 Power supply, lot of firmware bugs, webinterface the password Rigol Germany don't know!!!Horirble fonts on the display of this power supply.I asked Rigol some questions about the bad interface, bad firmware upgrade making a 2000 series power supply into a 900 series, how do you make it up!Testing, are you crazy, you let the user do that nicely, which seems to be a modern revenue model.Rigol DC Load,Outputs on the back of the device generate if you connect a device to it that is not connected to ground, so this has clearly not been tested!Like a battery scoop.When programming the duty cycle of this DC Load you cannot adjust that in percent, then you may start calculating that in time and then switch again to the duty cycle modes to see if your duty cycle at say 750Hz has the 73 percent needed for your measurement setup.Again, this has not been tested by the software tinkerers.And then we have the software you use to control many measuring instruments from Keysight, brrrr.So yes i feel your pain!Kind regards,BramTranslated withwww.DeepL.com/Translator(free version)

author: Veteran68
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 01:22:30 pm
content: Quote from: TSR on July 12, 2023, 07:13:41 amI'll give you some grace here since you're in rant mode, but I've worked on both the software and hardwire side of things and have run into my share of idiots in both, and geniuses in both. Especially on the BUSINESS side of software, where sub-standard product is almost always the result of rushed project timelines and seldom one of engineer competence.I chose the software path but I have a nearly-as-strong affinity for hardware. My professional career started as an embedded systems engineer writing firmware for hardware that I also participated in designing/tweaking/tuning. I chose the software field because I like it more, not because I "simply didn't have the brains" for hardware. To be quite honest, I'm pretty sure that I've been far more financially rewarded from software than hardware, as there are far more lucrative opportunities.These days I run the Enterprise Architecture practice of a large corporation, and my hobby now trends more towards hardware than software, but I still have a love for software engineering. To each their own, so don't be a hardware snob.

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 06:33:58 pm
content: Quote from: TSR on July 12, 2023, 07:13:41 amThat is a punishment to you for using obsolete units which were invented by people who married their cousins (C)

author: TSR
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 10:32:46 pm
content: It's much nicer to work with integer dimensions (say 15 mil between parts, 6 mil traces, 10 mil clearances) than fractions of a millimeter (0.38 between parts, 0.15 traces, 0.25 clearances).But hey, as a lowly American who am I to question the wisdom from that engineering powerhouse to the north.

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 12, 2023, 10:43:32 pm
content: Quote from: TSR on July 12, 2023, 10:32:46 pmApparently not as nice as you think, especially since manufacturing has long transitioned to metric, so all those nice round numbers are turned into fractions of milimeter. Oh, and then there are microns too, which is where the industry is heading, so before long you will have your nice integer numbers...in micronsQuote from: TSR on July 12, 2023, 10:32:46 pmYeah, but not to worry, because stone age down south is almost over, infact all those imperial units have been legally defined through metric quite a while ago.For those who didn't my reference:

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 02:47:33 am
content: "Imperial" units are what used to be used in Canada.The imperial gallon was larger than the US gallon."Customary" units are what are used now in the US, along with metric units.The US went metric in 1959, but didn't tell anyone.

author: Lyndsay_Doyle
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 07:24:19 am
content: I agree with you.I am totally fed up with it.I could rant too about the stupid things it does and has done to me, but I won't I will be on here for hours.I wish I never bought it.

author: Doctorandus_P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 01:13:45 pm
content: Did you know that in banana units a "tenth" is smaller then a "thou".And I almost fell of my chair when I learned that drills can be sized in fractional bananas, decimal bananas, or some numbered table.I also once imported one of the Nucleus boards (made in Altium, from ST's website) into KiCad, and the pads were "off". Especially with a 0.5mm pitch QFN or QFP (Can't remember) the pads were at noticeable irregular intervals. KiCad has a native resolution of nanometers (32 bit integers, so max theoretical PCB size is 4 by 4 meter). It's quite easy to replace those with native footprints in KiCad, but doing that and manually putting the tracks right easily wastes an extra half an hour during the conversion.It's also annoying when ordering connectors. Some screw terminal blocks (the green Phoenix for example) can be ordered in a pitch of either 5mm or 5.08mm. Up to about 2 or 4 pins it does not matter much, but with a 12 pin connector the difference is big enough that it just won't fit at all.Other annoying things is that they have some kind of table (yet again) just to look up what the cross section of a piece of electrical wire is.They put grains of sand along a banana and count them tho determine the grid for a piece of sandpaper. Why not just state the average size of a grain in a comprehensible SI unit?Also when I want to buy some yarn, fishing line or electrical wiring on Aliexpress the units are stated quite often in some incomprehensible banana units.It's about time to implement the Metric Act of 1866 (aka as "Kasson Act"):https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/metric-si/metric-policyIt really is completely Bananas.

author: DonKu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 01:43:17 pm
content: Quote from: asmi on July 12, 2023, 06:33:58 pmYour masters, the City of London cousinhood?

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 02:31:13 pm
content: Yes, a "tenth" is 1/10 of a "thou" that can be called a "mil".I have three sets of drills: number, fraction, and letter.The number and letter sets are exponential, just like resistor values, and get me close to any inch or metric size from 0.040 inch up to 0.500 inch, so I haven't bought a set of metric drills.Similarly, English, French, and German all have irregular verbs: one learns to live with such difficulties.(Z = 0.413000 inch, 27/64 = 0.421875 inch, continuing with fractions up to 1/2 = 0.500 inch.)As I have stated elsewhere, I was once confused in the UK when the local engineer asked me if "4 mil" wire sufficed for a power cable.I assumed he meant "4 mm diameter", but he actually meant "4 mm2area", which is quite different.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 04:15:54 pm
content: Quote from: TSR on July 12, 2023, 10:32:46 pmSure, because instead of 0.4mm or 0.5mm or 0.65mm pitch for an IC, you can count with 15.74, 19.68 and 25.59 mil and placing 0402 components on a nice 0.5mm grid you can do whatever you do now.Also every standard defines clearance and creepage distances in mm, but whatever. You can just convert everything, it's clearly better.

author: Doctorandus_P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 05:17:54 pm
content: That 0402, is that metric, imperial or banana units?Note: 0201 metric is quite small...

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 05:22:07 pm
content: Quote from: TSR on July 12, 2023, 10:32:46 pmWell, there is also a thing like micro-millimeters (micron or um) which give you a nice integer measue for distance. 0.38 mm = 380 microns. With ever decreasing trace widths, integer mils are not very suitable as a unit while metric just scales along. Some of my design have traces that are 92um wide. That is 2.34 mil. Not 2 mil and not 3 mil as these values would way off.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 05:45:37 pm
content: There are also "microinches" in English-language usage, commonly used to specify surface finish.Personally, and convenient in SI units with the standard prefixes, I try to do practical measurements using units where the numerical result is between 10 and 10,000.E.g., 15 nF rather than 0.015 uF, 1500 pF rather than 1.5 nF.This is a matter of personal choice.

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 06:49:43 pm
content: Quote from: TimFox on July 13, 2023, 05:45:37 pmMost schematics I've seen tend to use 0.1..99 range for caps, for example 0.1 uF instead of 100 nF, but 33 nF instead of 0.033 uF, but for resistors I typically see a 1..999 range, so a 100 Ohm is shown as 100, but 2200 Ohm as 2.2K, the latter range is also not uncommon for caps as well. I also found that even different schematics from the same company can have different ranges, so there don't seem to be any standardization.

author: Veteran68
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 06:51:49 pm
content: I may be in the minority but I'm one American who prefers to work in metric. Being exposed to the metric system both in my military and scientific/engineering endeavors taught me the value of working and communicating in a base 10 system. I long for the day when we finally get over our obsession with non-intuitive units of measure. I've gotten pretty good at mentally converting between SAE/Imperial units and metric. And I probably have as many if not more metric measuring devices around the house and shop as I do SAE. So I for one welcome our metric overlords!

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 07:42:12 pm
content: Quote from: asmi on July 13, 2023, 06:49:43 pmThere was an old convention (especially in the tube days) for non-polarized capacitors that values > 1 were in pF, values < 1 were in uF. Polarized capacitor values were in uF.All of the aboveunless otherwise specified.This was before nF were popular.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 07:48:37 pm
content: Quote from: Veteran68 on July 13, 2023, 06:51:49 pmCustomary binary-fraction inches are intuitive for some purposes, such as carpentry.Base 10 works fine, but gets cumbersome for binary fractions such as 1/64.Base 10 is good for micrometers, calipers, and height gauges, and mine all have decimal inches.I have no problem with metric: I own a 305 mm Crescent wrench, and my cameras have a tripod thread that is M6.35.Someday, someone can tell me what my metric shoe size of 45 means: I know what my customary size of 11 means, but it is complicated to explain to those who don't know what a "barleycorn" means in this context.

author: Feynman
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 07:55:59 pm
content: There is a special place in hell for engineers still working with imperial units. And until the devil gets you, you are - rightly so - tormented with software bugs, because the native units of the tool need conversion to imperial somehowWell, seriously... I guess almost every ECAD tool has some bugs like that. But a good tool has a company behind it that takes bug reports seriously and tries to fix them ASAP. I'm glad - when we had the choice between Altium and Pulsonix - we chose the latter. I don't think Pulsonix is the better tool overall. And it has its own fair share of bugs and weaknesses. But I'm pretty confident for a bug like that we would get at least a hotfix within a couple of days, although with 4 seats we aren't a significant customer to them at all.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 08:42:05 pm
content: Luckily, being a US citizen, I use customary units, not imperial.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_unitsAmericans are allowed to use both metric and customary, where the customary units are defined in terms of the international metric units.Going off the grid in a CAD program is a big nuisance. Before retirement, one of my reports had the knack for generating a new schematic diagram from an old one, making the needed changes, but it always ended up off the grid in the schematic capture program and therefore harder to edit thereafter. Since the units in schematic capture are irrelevant (as opposed to PCB layout where they have physical meaning), this had nothing to do with choice of units.

author: Veteran68
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 08:54:12 pm
content: Quote from: TimFox on July 13, 2023, 08:42:05 pmConstantly raising this distinction feels like you're being pedantic to me.Imperial and US customary are largely the same. Where they differ is primarily in volume units and a few lengths and weights that are virtually never used in most scientific and engineering circles. Things like "imperial gallon/quart/pint vs US gallon/quart/pint" and "stone" as a unit of weight and the now archaic "survey mile."When it comes down to the measurements that most of us in this forum are interested in, there's little to no difference between the two. And metric is superior to either for our purposes.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 10:14:05 pm
content: Not going to contradict, but rather to offer my condolences by way of explanation:Such is many things in life, often decisions made for historic reasons, perhaps they were right at the time, but passed down through the ages, we have to deal with their consequences.In this case, probably way back in the Protel days, fixed-point integer coordinates (or god forbid,BCD?) were used, and fractional-mil accuracy was wildly more than sufficient.The file format hasn't changed much over the years, I mean... it has, greatly, but largely by way of expansion, keeping old elements and formats that continued to work, and adding features on top of that. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If fixed-point arithmetic worked for two decades, surely it'll work for three?So, there are rounding errors, yeah.And also a limit on the maximum size of a design sheet. Which I think has been upped in recent years? But to be fair, as just outrightdumbas it is to have such an arbitrary limit on what ought to be position-independent* vector graphics -- it is pretty goddamn hard to find someone who can fab a ten-foot PCB at all.I don't know if AD uses floats internally, but sooner or later it has to get into either the in-memory objects, or the on-disk file, as whatever rounding format they use.*But, on that note... to be perfectly fair, integers are position-independent. Floats are the ugly ducks here. At 32 bits, you might not mind anyway (rounding error starts to become annoying (~µin) at distances from the origin of, what -- several meters?), but to be perfectly precise: floats are the number system which violates arithmetic rules, not integers!****When overflow is avoided. To beperfectlyperfectly precise, fixed-size "integers" are modular numbers. It's a shame few programming languages treat them this way, because it's so powerful, and fundamental (to the CPU), to do so. But, alas.So, your frustrations can be explained as misinterpretation: what you thought should be plain old numbers, is actually a rounded, integer (or modular..) system.Not that explaining a frustration with an internal failing, or highlighting ones' ignorance, is exactly helpful, I know. But, again, my condolences by way of explanation -- we all share these frustrations, and it's up to ourselves how we react to them. Your response to these frustrations is perfectly valid. Correct, even.I will say, in situations like these -- the frustration exists, regardless of whether we like it or not. Whether it causes us to lash out or whatever -- that is however a decision we still have control over.Anyway, as for ways to deal with it -- unsatisfying I know, but setting clearances toslightlyoff your desired limit, and snapping objects to grid otherwise (yes, tedious I know*), gives some wiggle room for rounding errors.I've noticed multi-routing tends to leave weird corners, like, sometimes I grab one trace in a bus and the whole rest of the bus suddenly pops out with an extra corner going *eeuurt* around some imagined blemish. Or, sometimes I grab a trace and the routemagically doubles underneath my cursor, and I'm only dragging one of the two pieces thus duplicated?? There's some weird internal state confusion at times, and sometimes it's worth getting a rough route in place, then replacing each trace with singly routed traces (P, T) just to clear those dubious traces out of the design.And, after a couple hours of shoving components and traces, and placing and deleting and replacing objects, the overall internal state starts to decay and you start to getInformationpopups. Time to reboot it. Well, that just happens, unfortunately; whatever it is, it's in my experience most often some kind of confusion of pointers, maybe a use-after-free, who knows, but it seems it's rare enough they've never been able to fix it. It can take hours or days of continuous operation before it shows up, or maybe mere minutes if you're particularly skilled at mis-operating your software, so to speak. Well, like I said -- standard frustrations, alas. It is what it is.*Personally, I like the tedium of shoving traces. I would argue it gives me time to reflect on the design overall, and maybe I'll think of some other place to place and route things, and arrive at a better design later. Rip-up and re-route is always faster than the first time you do it, or, well, it is for me at least; it's not that that initial effort was wasted, it's still contributing to the finished design, even if merely by way of ruling out only one very specific configuration.Tim

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 13, 2023, 10:25:13 pm
content: Quote from: Veteran68 on July 13, 2023, 08:54:12 pmMetric is good, and is internationally accepted in a consistent manner.The historical inch-based measurements are not internationally consistent, and I will continue to make the distinction between US customary and UK imperial.One large difference is the (obsolete) imperial gallon = 4.54609 liters (used for gasoline in Canada before metrication) and the US gallon = 3.78541 liters (still in use in the US), a ratio of approximately 1.2:1. A few centuries ago, there were different legal definitions for different liquids, and the US and UK simplified to different versions for liquid measure.(Prior to 1959, there was a small difference between the US inch and the British inch: the older US definition was 1 meter = 39.37 inch, the present definition is 1 inch = 2.54 cm, both exact conversions.)The "US Survey Foot", now being deprecated, uses the previous definition and is common in land-tenure documents: I am waiting for a new version of the deed to my modest house.

author: Lyndsay_Doyle
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2023, 07:29:21 am
content: I am in the UK and grew upusing imperial units.Slowly over time we all moved across to metric. (Except MPH instead of KPH)We have a customer in the US who insists on using imperial.The youngsters here convert their metric measurements to Imperial.There is nothing wrong with the conversion, but I often ask them how the inspectors are to measure 0.396"They are now coming around to putting 0.4" instead. Please dont ask me why we dont put 1/32 etc....

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2023, 02:24:09 pm
content: Quote from: TimFox on July 13, 2023, 07:42:12 pmI also remember seeing a convention (also rather old) which did not have any units for caps at all, and used integer numbers to indicate pF, while uF were always shown with a single decimal digit, so 100 pF would be just "100", but 100 uF would be "100.0".

author: ahbushnell
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2023, 03:14:55 pm
content: Quote from: Lyndsay_Doyle on July 14, 2023, 07:29:21 amI prefer metric but use both here in the US. And I can see why you might want to use .4 instead of .396". This assumes there is not a tolerance issue.But what is the problem with measuring .396"ThanksAndy

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2023, 03:57:03 pm
content: Misunderstanding tolerance in units conversion is not limited to metric/customary/imperial physical units.I remember a US newspaper headline about a bank robbery in the UK: "$2,400,000 stolen in bank heist".The British police had, in fact, estimated the robbery as about a million pounds.My favorite recent example was a discussion about climate change, referring to an increase of 2 Co, which the editor had run through his app to equal 35.6 Fo, a rather lethal amount.

author: ajawamnet
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 14, 2023, 11:10:50 pm
content: I've been kicked off the official Altium forum before...Been owner/user since the mid 90's when it was Protel. Before that an ORCAD and PADs user. So I have my grievances with them. Currently in 23.5 and 23.6 they broke the ability to control and display status of file-based library searches. still works in 23.4. In the past I had to fight to get them to fix it post 17... they fix, then they break it.As to it being endemic - There's a video that talks about what happened to a very famous audio software suite that's the "standard" in pro audio "Protools" - and how it sucks.In this section - -at 16:41 [NOTE - why does this forum not respect the "current time" URL?] - note where he talks about how Reaper (the competitor of Protools) has control over the source code, but how Avid/Protools fired all their developers and it's now a "revolving door" of people that have NO CLUE how any of it works and therefor just glom more code on to try and fix bugs without actually understanding the underlying architectural reasons it was written in the first place.But this is typical with the current lot of "man-bun, java jockey, pitiful python pirates" they call coders today. Script kiddies that mom said STEM was better to go into than something like archeology. People doing stuff for the wrong reasons.Now as to Reaper - look at what the founder - Justin - of Reaper states in this interview as to WHY he wrote it:at 3:50 Where Justin states:"when I left [AOL after they bought Winamp], I came away from it wanting to avoid that in the future; wanting to just make things for the sake of making them .. and not have to constantly justify everything with business decisions/motivations. The ability to just make software for the purpose of making it... for the end goal of making something that's really powerful and enjoyable to use"I do note that I tried a simple PCB with 10 mil trace on a 10 mil grid and it seems to place it correctly. I did notice that in the more recent (post 17) releases there's a snap call "Axes" that can cause it to snap to random stuff, throwing things off grid. That and the silly metric rounding thing sucks...

author: TSR
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: July 15, 2023, 09:33:41 am
content: That's a good answer, and yea it's a rounding error very likely due to some floating point issue.That said, you and I, and most everyone here, could come up with a solution in a matter of hours. Say, off the top of my head, when routing pin the center of the trace either to an (exact) grid point or the largest integer fraction (smallest possible denominator) of a grid point - and I'm sure there a much better and more elegant solutions that would take a day at most to code.So that's not the problem.The problem is that no one at Altium gives a damn about this - and that's on top of a long, long list of things that company doesn't give a damn about.But look at their website and the little pricks go out of their way to tell you how concerned they are about the customer. Total crap.

author: ajb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 15, 2023, 05:27:56 pm
content: Quote from: TSR on July 15, 2023, 09:33:41 amThat's a very easy thing to say....Do you really care if all of the tracks are on the grid, though? Do you care about them being on the grid *more* than you care about them being at exact spacings from each other? Because you can only have both if you only ever do 90° routing, and only ever use widths/spacings that are nice multiples of the grid. As soon as you have 45° tracks you have √2 multiples of your width/spacing involved, or corresponding multiples for other angles. Similarly if you want to route a 45° track next to a round pad. So take your pick between ugly/irrational grid positions, or ugly/irrational spacings. Grid alignment has no bearing on electrical performance or fabricability of the finished design, the only benefit is nice round numbers for the humans. Personal preference, but I would rather have consistent spacing and dead-on alignment of tracks to pads (at least down to whatever level of resolution) than nice round numbers in the X/Y coordinates.Once the design rules are set, Altium's walkaround/hug routing and track alignment featuresshouldallow that, but as Tim says:Quote from: T3sl4co1l on July 13, 2023, 10:14:05 pmThis happens all of the place IME, not just with multi-routing. Corners are a big problem. When routing a track parallel to an existing track at the minimum spacing, often the new track will refuse to continue past a corner in the neighboring track, or will jump around it. I suspect there's a problem with rounding in the trig used to calculate clearances around curved corners/ends of tracks. Those sorts of things, as well as significant issues with snapping/alignment, and track glossing, and interactive routing in general, are way bigger deals to me than tracks being off grid by a millionth of an inch. That absurdly small rounding error won't keep me from getting work done, the PCB will get fabbed and work perfectly fine either way. But those other things DO keep me from getting work done, and are bad for my blood pressure too. They're also incredibly hard to get right, especially when bolted on to a mature application, like the axis snapping feature, instead of built in early on. There's an inverse relationship between how easy software is to use, in terms of user effort for a given level of result, and how easy it is to write. Writing software to do what Altium does efficiently, intuitively, and with reliably good results, is not at all simple.That doesn't mean the current state of it is acceptable, of course, and I make no excuses for it, but it's pretty absurd to claim that you could come up with a better solution in a few hours when you consider how many factors are involved.QuoteI really enjoy optimizing layouts as well. That's part of the reason Altium's routing problems are really infuriating to me--but the silver lining is those frustrations make it easier to walk away from a perfectly adequate layout instead of spending another three days tweaking it to my own aesthetic satisfaction

author: nigelwright7557
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 15, 2023, 10:10:59 pm
content: I made a big mistake in my PCBCAD package in the pcb footprints.The design wizard allowed input of pitch between pads both vertical and horizontal.However this isnt always exact and offsets can multiply by the time you have say 40 pads in a line.I got a pcb back that was out by a pad !Instead of stepping so many mm converted from thou I multiplied the thou by the steps and this kept the accuracy much better.As for crap software, sometimes programmers dont always understand well what they are writing software for.I am a electronics engineer as well as a programmer so understand programmer and user side of PCBCAD well.A good tool I have is a "swap autoplacer" which swaps around components to find shortest net.With that I have routed a couple of pcb's that otherwise wouldn't go.

author: Feynman
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 16, 2023, 10:23:02 am
content: Quote from: nigelwright7557 on July 15, 2023, 10:10:59 pmYeah, that's a fundamental issue in software development. A great software developer is primarily a domain-expert and only secondarily an expert in C++ or whatever. Unfortunately many software developers have little to none domain-knowledge, which results in crappy software.

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 17, 2023, 02:46:52 pm
content: Quote from: Feynman on July 16, 2023, 10:23:02 amNo, developer needs to be an expert in programming first and foremost. Domain knowledge is useful, but not essential because "translating" biz requirements to the language which developers understand is a job of business analysts, as most good developers don't work in the same place for very long. Over my 20+ years of software development career I worked in all kinds of industries from e-commerce and games to industrial automation and embedded devices, so being an expert in each and every one of those is completely unrealistic.Crappy software is a failure of entire team, including biz analysts, QA folks and management, and not just developers' fault.

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 17, 2023, 02:48:29 pm
content: BTW if you want to feel real frustration - try routing differential pairs using rounded corners in AD. THAT is a real pain!

author: Lyndsay_Doyle
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 04, 2023, 09:13:46 am
content: I'm just wondering if we were to bill Altium for lost time, and inability to deliver product because we have to wait for a fix or a reply to a support call because Altium does something stupid, I think it would bankrupt them.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 04, 2023, 09:28:32 am
content: I mean, to be fair: how long do you think *any* company would last, with such a liability in the license?Tim

author: corey
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: October 24, 2023, 12:21:08 pm
content: My 2c on this continues on the nice counter-tangent the conversation has taken in metric vs imperial, in Altium.I wish they would just use a single unit (metric) for the schematic editor grid. Being an Aussie, of course I work in mm on the PCB editor, but so many _schematic_ models from anywhere (snapeda, ultralibrarian etc) are aligned to the imperial grid. It’s a seriously bad design choice to have both in virtual editor like the schematic capture editor where units don’t matter. The amount of time I’ve spent fudging around to get component pins onto the grid…I recently had a problem where Altium was giving me a Git error whenever I tried to open or save a project from my work’s workspace, and I couldn’t do any work. So I logged a ticket and the Altium guy helping me couldn’t figure out the problem, after way over an hour on a video call sharing my screen. He even got me to install a packet capture software which included https breaking (local signed trusted certificate) so they could analyse the traffic. I haven’t sent it to them but instead I just went and created another profile on my PC and it works fine. I’ve had to transfer my config and so on which has taken a while, not to mention documents, Firefox tabs, etc. It was a quicker solution than dealing with Altium tech support (which you pay through the nose for). Frustrating when software features actually cause major downtime when I’m very busy with tight time constraints. It is one of the reasons I hate anything “cloud”; local projects on my hard drive just work, always. But the workspace feature is pretty good for working in hardware design teams like I do.It’s a buggy bit of software, no doubt. Considering it’s not new and up to version 23.10 now, they have no excuses.But I’ve recently been learning and using Vivaldi and Vitis. Now _they_ are badly designed with the most confusing and unintuitive UI’s. Such a steep learning curve.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 24, 2023, 08:51:15 pm
content: Imperial grid in schematic isn't unique to Altium - it's been the default for both grids since forever when doing PCBs with anything. Metric is a relatively recent thing for the layout, and if you're doing through hole then imperial is still the better one to use. Personally, I use metric for the mechanical bits (when things like connectors and controls got, board dimensions, etc) but imperial for through-hole and larger SMT stuff. In the schematic I just don't take any notice of what the grid measure is, only that it's the same as what the schematic library symbols use.And as for PCB library parts... often I will use some weirdo fractional grid because that helps align things. In those cases, being metric or imperial only affects how many decimal places there will be.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 24, 2023, 10:35:50 pm
content: In general I'd say stick to the imperial grid in schematics if that is the default setting of the package as 99.9% of the symbols will be imperial. In the end it doesn't really matter anyway. Trying to use metric grid is entering a world of pain. Even going from Letter to A4 can cause weird effects (not specific for Altium, but in general for schematics packages).