A365 - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 14, 2020, 04:07:04 am
content: so... what do you all think?Personally, despite one or two limitations that I hope they can get around sometime, I really like the idea and what it gives you for "free" as part of a regular Altium licence subscription.It's a fair chunk of what I wanted Concord Pro for, but minus the structured approvals and release control stuff that you don't really need until you're getting quite big.Time will tell how well done and secure it is, but it's running on amazon cloud rather than altium's own server setup... so hopefully that means there's some good basic security in place that they have enabled and are using before they even get to their own application security stuff.

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 15, 2020, 06:19:50 am
content: So, nobody cares? or nobody's seen the details yet?The communications around it have been pretty confusing till now.I really like the ability to send "snapshot links" of a project to people... have tried it out as a test with someone I work with and it's cool to be able to show them a representation of a board they can spin around the screen and look at. paired with a view of the schematics and the live BOM, I think it makes things look more real..The biggest missing feature (at least something that I expected would just work and haven't been able to do) is folders... keeping a whole pile of projects in one single cloud directory would get mighty annoying over time. even if you're ridiculously careful with naming conventions. It just seems very painful.Also the whole "one workspace per organisation" is a bit of an issue.. not just for the problems relating to letting different groups of people have share access to different things (which you can do manually, but only if you lock everything down by default and only explicitly share things to exact people...) I think everyone in a workspace can see everyone else in there, even if they can't see each others stuff. Which could get awkward if you work with different groups of people.Also, the way that it seems you have one complete cloud library per workspace, and no way to use a cloud library across multiple workspaces is an issue for contractors... like, if I work for one company in their workspace, but also have my own workspace with my own components for my company, if I want to use parts I know and trust, it seems there's no easy way to even get the parts out of my library and into their design... let-alone the more correct process of out of my library and into their library, then into their design.Also I do find getting/adding/editing components in the cloud very confusing.. I had a lot of trouble yesterday in my lunch break when I was trying to just add one component to the default library to see how it worked. It took way longer than I expected it should because the workflow seemed pretty convoluted. Maybe it becomes easier with time?But niggles aside, I find it's a very sensible and promising development from all the weird little separate paths they've been taking over the last 10 years with configuration management and managing org data. It seems to tie a lot of things together. and it offers something to the small players rather than just large orgs, which is a nice change.

author: olkipukki
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 15, 2020, 03:36:20 pm
content: Quote from: julianhigginson on May 15, 2020, 06:19:50 amIt's really depends who you are and what are you doing and where...As example, if I am running a team where some sit here and other there, don't bother about a budget and eveything not related to a project (security, hardware, internet, cloud, legal, etc. etc. etc.) - "not my problem"; I would welcome A365 with open arms.That's clear for me, last a few years of my Altium subscription almost 100% went to subsidy A365 development that does not benefit me at all.

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 17, 2020, 05:47:33 am
content: A365 is "free" - well, it's a part of what you get with the regular software update subscription going forward.... so it adds another thing to "what you get" for your yearly update fee going forward.Compared to the various iterations of Vault, which was pretty much priced totally out of reach in terms of $$ and in house resources to deal with it to anyone running less that 20 engineers, I get the feeling they've taken stuff (that was developed with our subscriptions for the last 10 years, sure!) and actually offered it to smaller players rather than only the bigger players.Even concord (which doesn't seem to give you much extra in the way of features over the standard A365, but imposes proper release management and workflow control over everything in it) looks a lot more attainable for smaller operators. Though you still wouldn't consider it for a team of less than 5 or so, I think..I do wonder how it's going to work going forward, but it *seems* that they are serious about letting you run your own A365 workspace backups in the future (not yet available) and it *seems* like you can pull your projects out of a workspace with no damage to them, if you decide it isn't for you later. I'm not sure about retrieving an A365 library to reuse elsewhere without pain, as it has a lot more stuff in it than, say, a regular DBlib based library. That's still something I want to understand better before I would consider using a workspace based library.I also get the feeling that giving all those basic features "free" might be a smart move... because with no explicit workflow & approval management I do wonder how people will go with it as their teams grow.... so it's going to start to seem pretty obvious to companies as they grow that they will need to get into concord too. And I think that will work in a very natural way in terms of seeing the pain point to fix, as well as adopting to it when the time is right. Can't help but think they've segmented the whole thing between basic and premium very cleverly.Anyway... Right now I'm feeling a lot more confident about Altium's direction and future, having watched them stumble about in the wilderness with various versions of vault, circuitmaker, circuitstudio, and different other bits and pieces of web based tools they were acquiring and sort of faffing about with for years. Now it all at least makes some kind of sense to me.

author: Elasia
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 18, 2020, 12:55:34 am
content: A365 comes with the standard maintenance yearly fee for perpetual updates "subscription" ?I only half read about it but if its included might as well take a gander nowThey've always used confusing wording ><

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 18, 2020, 01:40:50 am
content: Yeah the messaging around all these new features until recently has been really confusing to me. They've been blasting out the brandnames (altium 356, concord) for a while now. Like, a year at least.... but it's only the last fortnight that I saw any solid info on what A365 will actually offer users. let alone the automatic bundling of the basic functionality to altium subscription.it's definitely worth browsing the online docs, or even just clicking through on AD20.1.8 and making a workspace to play with.https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/altium-365Whether you want to seriously adopt it just yet is another question. But it does look very promising.

author: olkipukki
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 22, 2020, 06:33:35 pm
content: I have an impression that Altium going to not exactly towards Autodesk & Adobe business model, more like to SolidWorks and Siemens.Eventually, we will able to buy a perpetual license, but in term of support and maintenance become less attractive.Let's hope I am completely wrong and keep positive - still can open AD 20 project in AD 19

author: alexwhittemore
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 07, 2020, 05:34:33 pm
content: I tend to agree with you Julian, I'm pretty excited about 365. A couple years ago when I was struggling with the best way to manage libraries and design data at a company with 3 designers, the only revision control option for design data was SVN, and either intlibs or SVNDBLibs for practical purposes. Introducing Git support in (I think AD17? 16?) was SUPER welcome, but library management was still garbage at best. Our solution was shared IntLibs on a network location, and notifying each other when one of us was in there working on components. Not super graceful. Unfortunately the only "better" option was Vaults which were wildly too expensive, wildly overkill for our circumstances, and also STILL just not quite what we even needed, given all the formality of release management and approval and etc etc.For a while there, concord pro sounded like it would deliver a good solution for that, so I'm pleased that they seem to have split functionality so that the stuff I need and want with respect to sane IP management and revision control is attainably priced (or, as attainably priced as Altium isn't in the first place), and all the stuff I can't afford is stuff I'm not big enough to bother with anyway.As far as utility to me, even now that I'm an independent contractor, I think it's exactly what I wanted: a way to centrally manage the IP I generate without basically any mental effort on my part. A couple things I've noticed so far:Libraries:The benefit of 365 for libraries is centralization and ease of access better than IntLibs or even dblibs, with built-in revision control. For a one man shop, this is pretty much a wash, but for two plus, it's already decently better than "just toss some intlibs in git" since handling merge conflicts on intlibs was basically impossible last time I tried. For any more than 5, I think this basically is a godsend.Projects:Ever since Altium introduced first class support for Git (and therefore "diff" and "merge" became practical vs using git manually, which made them a huge chore), my desire for a central boutique content storage option was pretty much nil. Just use github or bitbucket or gitlab or something, store all your projects in that structure, and you're gold. That said, 365 REALLY gets this right: if you push your project to 365 and enable version control, you're basically just letting it auto-handle most of the overhead of the solution I just outlined. And the copy on your PC is at all times a fully-qualified git clone, with all revision history and every option to do with that what you like. For instance, it would seem downright convenient to me to have an A365 project also cloned on github, and I just use the normal A365 workflow and occasinally manually "git push github master." That might even be a built-in menu item when you have a 365 project open, since it's all just git under the hood? Haven't checked. EDIT: Nope, all manual. I checked by opening a workspace project and adding a new remote manually. The default altium functionality handles pushing to remote "origin" automatically, but doesn't offer any options or shortcuts for pushing to arbitrary remotes. But you can of course still do it quite easily yourself, as long as you open an external git program or the command line.And then finally, my GREATEST fear is "what happens if I don't renew my subscription." It sure looks like the answer is "just download a copy of each project, which you probably have on your computer already anyway" - each is a full git repository with all revision history anwyay, so you're barely even losing anything by just checking it out then working on it as though it were a normal git-controlled project. Maybe component links for the managed library functionality? But maybe not even, since I assume those links are just parameters that get preserved anyway, if you ever regain access to that managed library. Then on the library side, a little more awkward, but it looks like you can just add an arbitrary set of components to a "content cart" then export that cart all at once into an IntLib. I imagine this is where you'd lose version history, so that MIGHT be annoying. But then maybe you can export your whole vault, with history. Not sure yet.Long story short, for me, it adds a lot of convenience to a workflow I was already going to try to maintain, with what APPEAR to be no obvious downsides or lock-in, other than probably wanting to keep paying for the convenience.Also Julian, you CAN use folders in your A365 workspace. Just go view>panels>explorer (can't do this from the web, annoyingly), and you can right-click to add a new generic folder, etc etc. Then right-click>move to move project folders into that new folder, and so on. Hardly as straightforward a UI as Windows Explorer, but functional. And it DOES exist.

author: Mangozac
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2020, 10:48:32 pm
content: Finally having GIT support is great but are any of the other new features that much of an increase in productivity to justify the price? They currently want AU$3k just to upgrade my older standalone AD license to On Demand with 1 year of 365 (which frankly I wouldn't use as I'd have no intention to continue using it after the subscription expires). Supposedly theyearlyprice from 1st of July will be AU$10k for an on demand license - that kind of price is just not justifiable for small businesses.

author: alexwhittemore
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2020, 11:51:44 pm
content: Quote from: Mangozac on June 16, 2020, 10:48:32 pmI don't know what version you're currently on, so it's tough to say, but if you don't currently have GIT support, I guess that means AD17 or before?Git support is important for me, but not SUCH a big deal since you CAN use git with older Altium, it's just manual and less convenient. The fact that it's got built-in support now mostly just means you can diff two versions of something without having to download the old version separately somewhere, then manually open the "diff" tool in Altium and not lose track of what you were doing at any point. This is especially less-problematic if you're doing solo work and never have to worry about a merge conflict, although I've never tried resolving a merge conflict in Altium, so maybe it still sucks no matter what.If you're on AD17 or before, you're still 32bit. That SUCKS. 4GB of RAM? Yuck. I have some old designs that would stochastically crash older versions merely to open the PCB. You'd have to try 3-4 times before it'd even successfully load, and even then the memory leak indicator would be stuck on orange ("I'm about to die soon") or red ("holy crap save NOW!") the entire session.AD18 I don't think was a WHOLE lot more stable than AD17, but I also didn't get a chance to use it extensively on those large crash-prone designs.AD19 and 20 sure seem WAY more stable than 17 and 16.As of AD19 (maybe 18?), the already-pretty-good manufacturing data/BOM workflow improved a fair bit on the back of the Octopart acquisition. This is, in my opinion, probably the most universally-useful win of Altium over any of the other EDA software I've used. BUT AD16/17 still had good functionality here, so it's tough to say if this is specifically worth upgrading.Probably the biggest reason to upgrade, AD20 has a completely re-written and WILDLY improved routing engine. It's more stable, way faster, and has new features. It now supports any-angle and arc-centric routing without running into the horrifying DRC slowdown that the previous engine would hit, where you basically couldn't push-n-shove anything near an off-angle track, because DRC couldn't calculate in real-time on non-45* increments.QuoteDifferent people have different opinions on relying on third-party infrastructure, but I'd take On Demand licensing like 364 days out of the year over Standalone. Which is neither here nor there, because you don't have to have an active subscription to use the on-demand scheme - you just have to own a license and have an Altium Live account (free).As for 365 - it basically solves all the problems I've had with library management at a small company, and adds a bunch of nice features around git versioning. I'm not 100% certain I'll renew my subscription at the end of the year, but if I'm on the fence in terms of wanting access to ongoing updates (and making enough money with an Altium workflow to justify it), 365 may well tip me in favor.IntLibs and SVNDBLibs suck when you're talking about multiple people independently adding components to them, and 365 fixes this. It just doesn't suck anymore, problem solved, simple as that. I'm excited to use this workflow even as an individual, but I admit, IntLibs versioned externally are pretty acceptable for a solo shop, and you can easily export whatever you've got in 365 to IntLib(s)The "managed project" stuff of 365 is basically "your project is in Git, but the remote is A365 instead of GitHub, and we give you a ton of convenient viewing/authorized access features on top of it. It's a clear and easy win in functionality, even for an individual, but I admit again not something you HAVE to have.Quote"Supposedly" per who? Sounds kind of outrageous, but also I think you might be confusing the "license" and "subscription" components - "on demand" doesn't imply subscription. But also AU$10k sounds like the normal list price for a perpetual license plus 1y maintenance subscription.FWIW, it sure SOUNDS from some conversations I've had that the whole "Free Altium365 with your maintenance subscription!" isn't a time-limited promo: I think A365 is a play at trying to make ongoing subscriptions more useful above and beyond just version updates.Anyway, I can't speak for you, but if I were in your shoes on AD16 or AD17 and had an offer to update for just the 1y maintenance cost, personally I'd probably take it. I imagine my strategy going forward is probably going to be kinda similar to my iPhone strategy - upgrade when there are super compelling features, or when it's been 4-5 years (and only when they won't retroactively charge me for the missed subscription years). In this case, I'm not sure about killer features, but I'd bet AD20 will feel worth it on performance."You could always try asking them to give you a 30 day trial of 20 for your next project. I'm pretty sure you can save in the older format, and that'll give you a good indication of whether it seems worth it.

author: Mangozac
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2020, 01:42:32 am
content: Quote from: alexwhittemore on June 16, 2020, 11:51:44 pmSorry, I wrote that poorly (and have fixed it in my original post). As you suggest, $10k is the new price for an on-demand license:https://www.altium.com/july2020-pricingI still find it a ludicrous figure given I paid half that for my copy a few years ago.Yes, as you note I'm running an earlier version - actually as old as AD10! I've found it largely bug free and the workarounds for the couple of bugs it does have are trivial. Performance is fine and our requirements aren't on the high end of design complexity. Having not paid for any further updates or support my return on investment on that software has been very good, so the idea of spending $10k plus another $2k per year is pretty galling.I don't have an issue with On-Demand - in theory that should simply make it easier for us to manage having a single license with more than one engineer (only one person needs Altium access at a time).

author: alexwhittemore
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2020, 02:23:17 am
content: Quote from: Mangozac on June 17, 2020, 01:42:32 amAHH - yeah ok. Yeah, it's a little confusing that they ONLY sell new licenses as "perpetual license plus 1y subscription." But indeed, $10k AUD is $6865 USD. Last I was aware, list price was USD $8500 for the license plus $1850 or something for the 1y subscription, and indeed, the US version of that link you sent says "$8890 instead of $9890" - so they're definitely saying the list price is going down from what it used to be. Still insanely high, and I never would have bought at full price, sure. But definitely not AUD 10k PER YEAR. And actually if it IS only $10k, AUS pricing seems to be cheaper than ours.QuoteWOW, 10! I'd for sure upgrade, though of course I can certainly understand if you don't feel compelled to. Only you can know! I definitely think it'd be worth a trial at that point, though the learning curve from all the way back at 10 might be almost discouraging in itself.QuoteJust to be clear, you don't HAVE to spend the 2k per year - Just the 2k built into the price for the FIRST year. You can simply not renew the subscription if you don't care to. But also, you shouldn't have to pay that full price, anyway:Under normal circumstances, if I paid for a subscription year 1, then skipped year 2, then wanted whatever they released in year 3, I'd have to pay the lapsed year 2 AND 3 to get it. But I understand they pretty frequently run deals where you can in effect just pay year 3, basically upgrading your perpetual license to whatever's current. If you talk to a sales person and say "I'm on AD10, will you let me buy a $2k subscription this year so I can upgrade?" I think they're typically, or at least sometimes, allowed to say yes. I think they tend to be more focused on bringing customers back into the yearly payment fold vs punishing customers for letting it lapse.QuoteI just wanted to make sure there's not confusion between "on demand" and "subscription that costs money." Of the 3 license types (Standalone, on-demand, private server on-demand), I'm pretty sure the only one you have to pay EXTRA for is the private server option. Presumably because only huge corporations with highly paranoid network segregation ever want that.

author: Mangozac
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2020, 02:33:59 am
content: Quote from: alexwhittemore on June 17, 2020, 02:23:17 amYes and that's exactly the offer at the moment - AU$3k to upgrade from AD10, including 1 year subscription.Quote from: alexwhittemore on June 17, 2020, 02:23:17 amYes, my understanding is that you can actually switch between standalone and on-demand at no cost at any time.Quote from: alexwhittemore on June 17, 2020, 02:23:17 amHow serious is that comment about the AD20 learning curve? I had assumed that the basics of the system would have remained the same. Don't tell me they've changed the hotkeys or anything like that?

author: alexwhittemore
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2020, 11:09:14 am
content: Quote from: Mangozac on June 17, 2020, 02:33:59 amOh no, nothing of the sort. I just mean that, if there’s so much new stuff buried in the corners, it might not be that easy to notice every little thing. I do recall a couple somewhat jarring reorganizations, but you’d figure those out easily enough (they ditched the DXP menu or whatever that used to be called, moved preferences, etc etc).

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 19, 2020, 05:35:02 am
content: Quote from: alexwhittemore on June 07, 2020, 05:34:33 pmcool!! I hadn't seen that, and it seemed crazy that it wasn't an option to create easily..... Hope they sort that out soon.I haven't actually spent a lot more time looking at A365 since I discovered AD20 has made an accidental change that's killed the reasonable use of xls files in a dblib for now (my bugcrunch is accepted and in development for now at least!) so I'm not seriously using AD20 till either they fix that or I migrate to a proper database format....I did notice a few more weird things that will need ironing out sooner or later - for instance I went to add a new schematic sheet to an existing project and found that my file templates that I manage on my drive weren't accessible to me, until I deliberately disconnected from the workspace - now I can see that being the correct behaviour in a workspace project, but not when I was working on a local non-workspace project!

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 19, 2020, 05:57:26 am
content: As far as modern altium git goes, I'm a fan... but not a massive one.I have been using git with all my altium work for years and years now.... just with the terminal commands... I really like being able to see modified/committed status in the projects panel since they brought it in (I had missed that since moving from svn) but I don't tend to need to do much more... it's just *nice* to have the status so visible in the application.I guess now it's integrated in A365 that's a new bonus, and I'm keen to see what happens if two people make different changes to the same file, or anything else. like being able to deal with commit diffs in Altium where you can actually look at the changes might be handy. I haven't needed it so far though.As far as recent new features in altium go, I think draftsman is huge.. being able to make good PCB fab documents a part of the project that can be released with the gerbers is absolutely a game changer for me.... when it appeared I could finally retire my manual process of updating a word doc to make a PCB fab doc every time I did a gerber release... on top of that, just the general quality and usefulness of documents you can produce with it vs the old documentation tools in outjobs is just light years ahead.If I only had an AD10 license available to me, knowing how much I use draftsman I'd pay the $3k just for that.Also I've been getting into Active Bom in the last 6 months or so... can't say I'm fully across everything it offers, but i really like the extra visibility it gives you over part lifecycle and distributor availability. I think there's a fair bit of value in that, too... even though right now it sits on the other side of my workflow as my parts database. the idea of integrating that kind of status and availabilty data in realtime with a parts database in A365 is a big pull for eventually moving into A365 for me, once it's a bit time tested and ready. (and the same time it's a bit of a big step because there have been changes to parts layers in footprints - and a lot of my existing parts library will need work around that, I think... unless there's a simple way to auto link consistent usage of old mech layers to new parts layers...

author: robermeyer
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: June 21, 2020, 05:20:26 pm
content: You hit on the most important point. A365 sucked up maintenance resources that could have fixed some real issues and long needed bug fixes.

author: alexwhittemore
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2020, 02:10:34 pm
content: Quote from: robermeyer on June 21, 2020, 05:20:26 pmWhat do you have in mind? The completely new routing engine took care of most of my outstanding bugs, AFAIK. The only other one was around scripting, which I haven't looked into yet.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 23, 2020, 01:53:54 am
content: QuoteFlexPCB stackups.

author: ajawamnet
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 12, 2020, 04:25:19 pm
content: Quote from: alexwhittemore on June 22, 2020, 02:10:34 pmI'd have to say you're right about the 365 silly vs fixing the bugs....And they keep introducing more bugs... they just keep pushing them around. They add some feature or fix one bug and introduce two more. There's a guy on their forum that has a dancing drinking cup trying to plug four holes with two arms.See attached GIF or this link:http://www.ajawamnet.com/dancingcupwithholes.gifThey have so many issues right now ... I'm in touch with a lot of old timers on their forum and they bitch more than I do. I've used Protel/Altium since the mid 90's (switched over from Orcad when they hosed their 6.22 port to winblows) and have done over 3,000 designs with their shit. It's better than anything else- at least for our workflow.For instance they broke multipart package annotation. I reported on their forums as well as other have.I recently got thanked for showing the legacy selection in AD20 for enabling the older routing engine since they recently totally trashed that too - so it's obvious that I'm not the only one that feels that way.Then there's the part library search that goes out to la-la land and unlike AD17 gives no clue as to search progress or any ability to stop.And then they take shit out - like being able to dissolve layer pairs as did AD17. It's obvious they are being driven buy marketing - not customers (see my movie below).What's funny is that they took out transparency by object/layer - then put it back in after everyone complains - and tout it as a new feature...As to 365 - Uh... we have no idea where their servers are, and if in the Ukraine that's a non-starter for us. Anyone on their forum will note the change over to obviously Ukrainian sounding names. In fact, a lot of them pulled their photos for some reason ( which sucks since Svetlana is hot as hell) .As to part management - we have our own MRP and PR system that includes ALL the parts of a product, so that's kinda useless to us.I recently did a vid on what i think happened at Altium -http://www.ajawamnet.com/wtfover.mp4... and many other places that have been overrun with developers that have little low-level coding experience - Man-bun Java Jockey, Pitiful Python Pirates I call them. When i worked with some of the best hackers and two - ex-NSA guys , those kids (that actually knew what a CPU register is) loved the sloppy ass coding and dependencies, since it gave them a door to exploit their shitty code on a shitty OSNot sure what this forum owner thinks, but I recall when they went to the 64bit thing he had some choice words to say about it (I think his son was trying it) I too was using AD17 for the last 3 years while still paying for maintenance in the hope they'd find their way.I'm not sure if they will - like I mention in that vid, they lost a lot of the "keepers of the clue" including the forum owner, during their silly move to China to try and convince the scads of companies that were using cracked copies P99SE/Designer for almost all the motherboards and consumer gear.My clients were part of the fallout of that when I got calls about a "stop buy" on altium when one of the government installations IT folk noticed a seat trying to connect to a china-based IP address.That move may have cost them a large section of their paying clients.And I recall talking with a guy - ended up as the regional manager for Altium - that I had worked with when he was at PADS back in the early 1990's. He mentioned the uphill battle that Altium faces with trying to get into large corps - stuff like the IBM's, Intels, Apples, Samsungs, etc... since they buy million dollar IC design tools from guys like Cadence, who then goes, "oh yea... you need to put that on test PCB huh? Well here's a bunch of seats of Oracd/Allegro (including the specctra router with all the bells and whistles) for free. That regional manager had a lot of connections with users he'd been dealing with for years.They'd say, "Yea I really like Altium... but I can't ask corporate to buy something that I get for free..."So they got a lot of silly going on and I wish them the best.I've recently tried using AD20 on a few designs and it's getting a bit better - after everyone complained, they put the modal dialogs back for a lot of single part editing. It's funny too, 'casue again the touted it as a "new feature" when they brought it back...What they could do is to make a multi-channel copy paste like Cadence has - see thishttp://www.ajawamnet.com/HowcopylayoutSHOULDbedone-allegro.mp4As to the new layer stack manager - kinda cool but slow and sometimes buggy. And if you're really into high speed design, not sure how muh that's help with something like this - Glass weave skew:https://www.pcdandf.com/pcdesign/index.php/current-issue/266-material-matters/13746-material-matters-1907https://www.pcdandf.com/pcdesign/index.php/current-issue/266-material-matters/13801-pcb-material-matters-1908https://www.pcdandf.com/pcdesign/index.php/current-issue/266-material-matters/13881-material-matters-1909https://www.pcdandf.com/pcdesign/index.php/current-issue/266-material-matters/13964-how-to-avoid-getting-totally-skewed-part-fourFrom the review in Part 4:"Review: When and why to care about glass-weave skew. At what frequency should you care? Each differential serial-channel standard and speedhas its own tolerance for skew. Most standards or chip manufacturers offer guidance on skew tolerance, but we can generically characterize that a channel’s tolerance for skew is described as roughly 25% of the bit stream’s unit interval (UI). For example, a 1Gbps (500MHz) signal would have a UI of 1000ps. Using 25% as a guideline, that represents a 250ps skew tolerance. That’s a wide window, and that’s why most engineers didn’t need to worry about GWS 20 or more years ago.Fast forward to designing at 10Gbps (5GHz). The unit interval is 100ps, and the skew tolerance decreases proportionally to around 25ps. PCI Express 4.0’s signaling speed, at twice the speed of PCIe-3.0, is even faster: at 16Gbps (8GHz). This maps to roughly a 60ps UI and 15ps of skew tolerance – half of the 30ps skew tolerance in PCIe-3.0."The gist of these articles is that in 10Gb and higher, the amount of glass weave vs resin/mucky shit can make a difference in skew... if half of a diff pair is more over weave and the other of the pair is more over resin, you can get near the 25ps skew tolerance of 10Gb. It's possible that the mfg ref card is controlling the PCB material/weave direction:"Some mitigation techniques outlined in this four-part series are what I call “deterministic” solutions. These solutions, including artwork rotation and angled routing, are almost guaranteed to mitigate skew. In the case of angled routing, another benefit is the routing process is entirely within the OEM hardware team’s control, and – at the cost of board space – the practice only directly affects the high-speed differential interconnects about which you’re concerned.Other mitigation techniques are “probabilistic,” meaning they reduce the probability of a skew problem, while not necessarily guaranteeing skew problems will never occur on a unit in high-volume production. See Part Two in this series for some of the skew-control techniques, roughly ranked in ascending order of cost in manufacturing. I’d be interested in your comments if this series rang true. Feel free to download the evaluation software that includes a tutorial for mitigating glass-weave skew from z-zero.com.References1. Lee Ritchey, Minimizing Skew in High Speed Differential Links, (video), 2015.g.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 12:20:23 am
content: Quote from: ajawamnet on August 12, 2020, 04:25:19 pmThis happened when Altium made the move to China. They thought they'd get lots of top notch programming talent for cheap there, only to find that, oops, if you can find top notch programmers, they aren't cheap and they don't stay long. Epic fail.Altium had a top Ukranian programmer at the time and he recruited a bunch of fellow Ukranian programmers and they formed a programming group working out of the Ukraine IIRC.I believe that in the end that group ended up doing a bulk of the programming as the old school PCB team from the Protel days eventually all left.No idea where their servers are located.Also IIRC, Altium had to move the HQ from China as all their big military customers threatened to stop using it.

author: ajawamnet
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 13, 2020, 02:57:48 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on August 13, 2020, 12:20:23 amSo that's the story eh? Lovely. And yea, and I was associated with one of those mil clients. They had seats and on my rec were gonna buy another dozen. I then get a panic call from the head guy at the base, stating that the DoD was freaking out about connections to some Chinese IP address. An immediate stop buy/use went out.The asked me what to do. I told them to try Cadence. They did and that's what they bought. Had no choice.And from what the regional manager at Altium told me, those DoD and US Gov clients were their biggest at the time.I then recall seeing a lot of questions on the forum from Google engineers. Eventually they got a bit testy, with these engineers bitchin' worse than I do. So I see all that go away - I haven't seen a question from a Google user in quite some time.I then get some dev kit designs from them - all in Cadence. Not sure but damn, it looks like they switched. I'm thinking that it had more to do with Google going into fabbing their own semi's and they got the top end seats of Orcad/Allegro for free.So, Dave, where do you think that leaves Altium? They're not gonna penetrate the big boys (can't compete with free) and slowly but surely even moderately large companies are starting to do their own IC's. KiCAD keeps improving, Eagle, well Autodesk killed that, and every year Cadence does a $600.00 special for their basic schematic and PCB tool.I recall Nick wanted Protel to be a low-cost tool for the masses. One of the reasons he used Directx, which now is silly since their ECAD/MCAD collaboration thing uses 3D tools - like Sourworks - that requires an OpenGL card ( I was one of their first customers in 1995)It seemed for a while that the powers that be at Altium were targeting a takeover form Dassault, similar to what was happening to other EDA tools that were being bought by companies like Siemens. Not sure if that's the case.As to the Ukraine programmers - well, comparing AD17 to AD20 - it seems the Chinese are better production coders; either that or when they did the port to 64 bit they inadvertently destroyed the code base, and without the keepers of the clue like you guz have no clue what a hardware EDA tool should do and what's really important to guys in the trenches like me.I called one day and asked why the hell did they take some functionality out. "You're lucky we didn't take out more..." was this lady's response and then hung up. I was like geez, this is what I pay maintenance for? Really? And from talking to her, it seemed obvious she had no clue as to what I was talking about and what it was for.As to 365 - I recall reading this:https://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcript-alu-ax-earnings-170522379.htmlYour next question comes from the line of Andrew Levy from Macquarie.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Andrew Levy, Macquarie Research - Analyst --------------------------------------------------------------------------------I've just got 3. Just on the capability-driven selling, I was wondering if you could sort of talk about the functionality or capabilities you're referring to there and also what some of the new functionality that you'll be able to charge over and above what you currently charge for Altium Designer. What kind of interactions with manufacturing or other areas do you look to monetize through that platform?And the second question was just on Octopart. A couple of parts there. The first one, I thought I saw somewhere that you've moved to sort of live pricing dynamics within Octopart and were moving that model along. So I was just wondering if the revenue model at all is changing there or you're planning to change the revenue model around Octopart. And the second one is just on the growth rate, which looks to have slowed a little bit in the second half. So just wondering how we should think about the momentum in that business. And that was kind of 3, which is 1 head, 2 parts.The third one that I've got is just on, are you able to give the number of term-based licenses that were sold in the FY '19 year so we can back out the perpetual license sales and term-based license sales in that period?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Aram Mirkazemi, Altium Limited - CEO & Executive Director --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Okay. Maybe to answer the first question about Altium 365, the pricing model and the capabilities, the way I think about it, the way we think about it is the range of collaboration. If the range is within the design space, which is, I call it like short-distance collaboration, that's pretty much part of the standard subscription, and you get that, and there is no additional price for that. Then there is this midrange collaboration, which is a, say, collaboration between electronics and mechanical or collaboration between electronics and ERP system or systems that are kind of arm's length from electronic design context, then you go to that next level. And then ultimately, when the collaboration is long-distance or long-haul collaboration, which is between design and manufacturing or design and supply chain, then we'll be monetizing that accordingly. So this is the general way we look at it in terms of capabilities and our pricing.As far as Octopart and their live pricing is concerned, one of the key things about Octopart is that they are absolutely passionate to be the trusted source for all things about parts data. Previously, their parts data, the pricing on that could be up to 24 hours old, but they have now rolled out a system or a capability that they can tell you exactly by how many minutes or how many seconds their pricing information is out of date. And that's a critical part of their increasing, improving their level of trust.As far as their revenue is concerned, if you look at Octopart's revenue, they have grown their revenue quite aggressively. We expect their revenue growth to continue, but, however, there are things like trade wars and things that are affecting manufacturing. And when manufacturing as a whole gets affected, then the purchasing part will go down. And then that means also, there will be less number of search, searches that are conducted on our platform, and that could impact revenue. We will be keeping an eye on that.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph G. Bedewi, Altium Limited - CFO --------------------------------------------------------------------------------But it's still click-based, and they are moving into other areas also, selling data, API interfaces. So they have opportunities. But the market is definitely more dynamic now with the trade wars and things like that going on.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Martin Ive, Altium Limited - VP of Finance --------------------------------------------------------------------------------And then the final question in terms of the number of term-based licenses. So we currently have about 1,240 term-based licenses that are included in that subscriber pool, and that includes Nexus and also includes Altium Designer, term-based licenses.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph G. Bedewi, Altium Limited - CFO --------------------------------------------------------------------------------The reason we put the term-based licenses into the subscriber pool is this is something, as we move forward and we get more and more in term-based licenses, it's a much better gauge of recurring revenue. So we're having different categories of licenses in the subscription pool. So...This is interesting from the CFO:"Related to the renewal rate decline, it really was a function of Europe. Europe had an issue with capacity. So we're adding capacity as we move forward, and we expect that to be fixed as we move forward. We also believe that we're shifting the way we're selling subscriptions now, and we're going to start getting more and more into the capability-driven aspect of it as Altium 365 comes on board. So into 2020, we expect to see these rates start to improve also moving from a maintenance-type subscription to a more capability-driven subscription, okay?"No, not OK....Where their only concern seemed to be the "recurrent revenue" thingThis is interesting - a question :Chris Savage, Bell Potter Securities Limited, Research Division - Senior Industries Analyst --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Yes. I saw the growth rates didn't match up on the subscriber numbers you put in for last year.answer:Joseph G. Bedewi, Altium Limited - CFO --------------------------------------------------------------------------------We did -- we went retroactive, and that's all included in term-based. So it's apples-to-apples comparatives.then the question about Nexus - as any Altium user knows that's been deprecated for Concord:Chris Savage, Bell Potter Securities Limited, Research Division - Senior Industries Analyst --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sure. And just -- is it fair to say now, just trying to read into your comments on Nexus -- is the handbrake off now? Because I remember, at the half, Joe, you said you were being pretty judicious in how you were ramping it up and making sure the customers were happy. So are you now full throttle on that?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph G. Bedewi, Altium Limited - CFO --------------------------------------------------------------------------------We invested -- when we talked about investments, in the second half, we invested pretty heavily in our solution-selling approach, and that was with Nexus. So I would say they're ramping forward. We've put more pressure on them to expand. And as Aram mentioned, we now have several customers who are on board who are still systematizing as we deploy. So I would say it's still going, but there's a much greater focus on it.And wow - this sounds like total bullshit:Your next question comes from the line of Ray Tollefsen from Teaminvest.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ray Tollefsen;Teaminvest, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sam Weiss, the Chair, spoke to our group in Melbourne just over a year ago, and one of the issues then was China. And he mentioned that in the past, there had been quite a few unauthorized copies of the various programs, but that he thought that the move to the cloud would certainly overcome that because the unauthorized copies would soon be out of date. Assuming that that's the case, is that actually contributing to the China growth? Or is it just going anyway?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Aram Mirkazemi, Altium Limited - CEO & Executive Director --------------------------------------------------------------------------------No, it's actually not at the moment because we have not actually rolled out Altium 365, well, globally but also not in China. We are planning to roll out Altium 365 in China with Chinese characteristics, and that should help us in that regard.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ray Tollefsen;Teaminvest, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Okay. So the growth is actually just a straight-out selling of the existing software to try more people.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph G. Bedewi, Altium Limited - CFO --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Yes. We should be clear that it's a license compliance model. So we're actually getting paid for licenses that have been used illegally.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ray Tollefsen;Teaminvest, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Used illegally, you said?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph G. Bedewi, Altium Limited - CFO --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Correct. They're pirated copies in essence.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ray Tollefsen;Teaminvest, --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Yes. So are you still getting paid for them?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph G. Bedewi, Altium Limited - CFO --------------------------------------------------------------------------------We are now, yes.And more bullshit about 365:Stuart B. Turner, Blue Ocean Equities Pty Ltd, Research Division - Senior Equities Analyst --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Congratulations on a lovely result. We are wondering about the Altium 365, the trial, and very interested if you could give us some color on the types of clients that you've got in the trial and whether or not the trial relates more to the factory floor side of the platform or the proposed platform or it's sort of more on the design side or just where the weight of the trial is and what some of the benefits that the clients are hoping to get from it because it's obviously quite new.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Aram Mirkazemi, Altium Limited - CEO & Executive Director --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Stuart, the trial is now focused on customers that are going to be using it within the domain of design. This is, as we said before, that we're going to get them onto Altium 365 first before we can actually then get them over to supply chain and manufacturing. So the first goalpost for us is to get designers, all our users to actually use Altium 365 for collaboration in kind of things that you do with your team members, with your other teams from other divisions and so forth. One of the particular companies that have been using Altium 365 is a company called Arduino. It's Italian company. It's got a huge in phenomenon the electronics world. They produce these microcontroller boards for millions of people who actually use it for getting into electronics and embedded software programming. They are using Altium 365 as the platform for their hardware design and being able to use it in their ecosystem, which is a huge ecosystem. They obviously connect to manufacturing floor and so forth. But right now, the focus is to get their design activities onto Altium 365, and that's one of our flagship partners we've been working on. There are others. There's one in U.K. And we're trying to establish Altium 365 as the cloud platform for design collaboration, and that is a critical one to get right. Because after that, then you can get them to supply chain and manufacturing, which is a natural extension. But the first step to get on the cloud is a key for us to succeed.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------and even more crap:Stuart B. Turner, Blue Ocean Equities Pty Ltd, Research Division - Senior Equities Analyst --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Congratulations on a lovely result. We are wondering about the Altium 365, the trial, and very interested if you could give us some color on the types of clients that you've got in the trial and whether or not the trial relates more to the factory floor side of the platform or the proposed platform or it's sort of more on the design side or just where the weight of the trial is and what some of the benefits that the clients are hoping to get from it because it's obviously quite new.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Aram Mirkazemi, Altium Limited - CEO & Executive Director --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Stuart, the trial is now focused on customers that are going to be using it within the domain of design. This is, as we said before, that we're going to get them onto Altium 365 first before we can actually then get them over to supply chain and manufacturing. So the first goalpost for us is to get designers, all our users to actually use Altium 365 for collaboration in kind of things that you do with your team members, with your other teams from other divisions and so forth. One of the particular companies that have been using Altium 365 is a company called Arduino. It's Italian company. It's got a huge in phenomenon the electronics world. They produce these microcontroller boards for millions of people who actually use it for getting into electronics and embedded software programming. They are using Altium 365 as the platform for their hardware design and being able to use it in their ecosystem, which is a huge ecosystem. They obviously connect to manufacturing floor and so forth. But right now, the focus is to get their design activities onto Altium 365, and that's one of our flagship partners we've been working on. There are others. There's one in U.K. And we're trying to establish Altium 365 as the cloud platform for design collaboration, and that is a critical one to get right. Because after that, then you can get them to supply chain and manufacturing, which is a natural extension. But the first step to get on the cloud is a key for us to succeed.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 14, 2020, 08:04:55 am
content: Quote from: ajawamnet on August 13, 2020, 02:57:48 pmNo idea, I don't follow it any more. I even have no idea what 365 actually is about, just haven't looked.Weren't they supposed to be shooting for the high end with a new tool? I thought that was supposed to be Nexus, am I wrong? Now it seems Nexus is just some "collaborative team" tool or something?Altium survive on brand loyalty and the extreme pain of switching tools for existing users.KiCAD is dominating the low end, you'd be dumb to use anything else really. Eagle is all but dead as you said, zero buzz about that anymore, all the hype has moved to KiCADQuoteI never heard about that. I doubt Nick would have let that happen, this was his hobby business, his life.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 14, 2020, 08:08:27 am
content: Ah, it's wasn't Nexus, their high end tool was called Atina. Whatever happened to it?https://www.altium.com/resources/investor-announcement/altium_ltd_fy16_full_year_presentation_24_aug_2016.pdfFrom what I can gather, Atina was renamed Nexus, but then it just became a productivity add-on for AD instead a separate high end tool?

author: ajawamnet
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 14, 2020, 01:21:58 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on August 14, 2020, 08:04:55 amMight be one of the reasons they canned his ass after going public on the AUS stock exchange. Hobbies don't make shareholders rich I guess. Sad too, since hobbyist's drive the fucking technology darlings that these investors salivate over...As to Atina - Fucking gone. Another one of the "honey I shrunk the board" BS moves I guess; at least they didn't waste a lot of users time on it.It's pretty much as that stockholder's conf call states - increase recurrent revenue by using a Clown Computing strategy... They can't do what Adobe and Autoshaft did - getting rid of license and going to a rental model. They aren't big enough nor have the market penetration that those guyz have - even the CEO or CFO alluded to that.On a positive note, the nice things about Altium:1 - a simple alf standalone license - all the other systems they have suck. With the standalone you have control of your company's disaster control, where you can install on new hardware without having to phone home to Mommy2 - older versions of the suite can open files generated by newer versions.This is cool of them; check this out:they came up with the integration of Simbeor (sounds like a Disney flick) for impedance calcs in the layer stack manager. It's slow, clunky still got a bit of bugs, but it works. Silly that they use "Altium" materials; all the CM's and fabs I use laugh at that shitte..In the layer stack manager it actually opens another document that you can save out as a template. And part of that is an impedance table that can assign widths based on your layer stack. At first it only supported microstrip and sym. stripline but nw does most of it including CPW. Cool. Even takes into consideration copper weight and orientation of the copper on the core or pre-preg (a feature I had to explain to the tech support guys - they had no clue and thought it was component orientation)So you set it up and then save it back to the PCB. Kinda clunky but it works OK. You can then assign rules to these various impedance profiles (D100 for 100 ohm diff pair, S50 for single ended 50 ohm, etc..) it will then set the widths to that . Pretty coolWhat happens if you open the PCB file in an older version? Well, the older version - not having this - will actually set up standard width rules based on what the AD20 file had calculated with Simbeor. Fucking nice. I wish Sourworks would do that.Maybe I shouldn't mention this stuff since if they see this they may take out tose nice to haves that allows a user to have control over his IP that he designed using their POS software.See my rant on marketturd:http://www.ajawamnet.com/ajawamnet/WhyIlikeDongles.htmlScroll down and read the link to Fenwick and West's document on License Patent Basics. Recall F&W did the first shrinkwrap EULA click thru for Jobs and Woz back inthe day:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenwick_%26_West#ClientsI recall when I did one of the first wireless IoT patents back in 1995/6 -http://www.ajawamnet.com/amnet/index.htmlAfter all kindsa take over attempts - when the lame-ass investors finally realized the significance of an @ symbol and accused my co-founder of buying his wife new boobs on the company credit card - I met with an IP attorney; one of top in Pittsburgh (BTW - only use Wash, DC based patent attorney unless you someone like Verizon - whole other story).So he asks me, "why do you think they license software?"I had no fucking clue...Well, the answer he gave me is in that Fenwick doc... on page 6. It has to do with the ability to write off RnD without ever selling anything, and other tax considerations such as how "royalties" are handled - see page 10.Fun times... we're so fucking pwned.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 14, 2020, 11:39:16 pm
content: Quote from: ajawamnet on August 14, 2020, 01:21:58 pmYes, Altium Designer is brilliant at forward and backward file compatibility. Even using hundreds of different internal daily build versions (the hardware group were supposed to use the latest internal daily build for real designs) with all sorts of experimental features, not once did the file system ever break.

author: thmjpr
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2020, 05:12:19 am
content: Quote from: julianhigginson on May 15, 2020, 06:19:50 amLooks like they are planning to make it publicly available:https://www.altium.com/viewer/

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2020, 08:50:48 am
content: Nice. That might actually get me interested in the cloud!One of the issues I have is that simply viewing a design can cause the file timestamps to change, screwing up the SCS reference. I often want to refer to a design but notdoanything to it, and a week down the line not knowing if it's changed because I've changed something or just looked at it can be a problem. So I got a viewer license for when I just want to view stuff, but all that does it restrict what you can do. Sure, you can't edit anything but it still causes a change in, say, a project file if you open a document.This online viewer seems to be actuallyjusta viewer, which would suit my purposes just fine

author: ajawamnet
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2020, 04:38:40 pm
content: Well, they tried it on their own forum if you'd attach a design file to have others try and figure out what is up with some problem. It was hideously slow - even on gigabit connections. I notice it no no longer does the automatic rendering of the attached design... And as to the cloud thing - well we can't use it. Even our commercial clients are wary of any of the proprietary designs being on some god-knows-where server. As to our fed/state clients - no f'ing way. No way to tell who has access to that server and what backdoors might exist.

author: olkipukki
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2020, 01:46:13 pm
content: How is your A365 today? Can you access it?