Altium  Circuitmaker Slow as a wet week and part rotating problems - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: retrotubeguy
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2016, 07:53:58 am
content: Hi, I have been messing with altium circuit maker. I have tried most of the free platforms and feel that this is the most professional one. It is nice but frustrating as hell. I understand that to be as powerful as it is, it becomes complex and full of options, settings etc. What I cant understand is why it is so slow and unstable. I have a good internet connection, a fast powerful PC and plenty of patience but I am ready to break something. It is so unproductive and discouraging that it makes you want to give up and go back to grid paper and and dalo pen.I have not found a lot of support for circuit maker. Everything that is covered in tutorials and youtube vids I get. But some simple stuff that is not covered is driving me mad. Too many to list here but the one that is ticking me off the most at the moment is that, when I rotate components in the PCB editor, rather than rotate on axis as they do in the schematic capture they seem to dart off to some distant land out of view with stretched out net wires. The only way to bring them back is with the ctl & arrow keys. If you happen to click somewhere and deselect the component then it is gone for ever. I have been forced on occasion to start over when this has happened. What am I doing wrong or is this free version just a P.O.SIf altium wants people to buy the full version, they should make the free version as painless as possible. I would rather have a layer limit or have to pay for upgrades than deal with this cloud crap. It is so slow its like watching grass grow and, you cant save the dame project to your PC. So your project belongs to the community weather you like it or not. Its dumb. Surprised that Dave has not done a new rant about this, or am I alone. Is it just me. I hope so because that would mean there is hope. Not feeling it at the moment.PLEASE HELP READY TO GIVE UP.

author: ludzinc
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 08, 2016, 08:49:39 am
content: There's a bug with rotating parts. If you have more than one selected the axis is the mean point of the parts.The CM forum explains it better than me. There's a few other known bugs listen in there too.As for slow - I'm fortunate enough to be here in Oz and I must use it while most of the world sleeps. It's passable but not snappy.IMHO it would be better if they cache more stuff locally but meh.I find once schematic capture is done and you're ready to lay out your board, it's bloody awesome from there.

author: retrotubeguy
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2016, 09:08:42 am
content: True, I am also in AUS and I find I need to wait for the world to sleep also. I figured out what i was doing wrong by accident. I was not holding the left mouse button down while rotating the part. So, it turns out if you click on the part and have it highlighted then use the space bar to rotate, the part shoots of somewhere out of view. Do't know what purpose this serves but it had me going for quite a while. I agree its awesome a s a PCB layout tool steep, learning curve though. I used circuit maker 2000 and it was super fast and easy to use, even on those old Pentium machines. Never did get the PCB layout to work from a schematic. i used trax maker on its own but could never get them to play together. anyhow, until I can justify spending 5K+ on Altium this will have to do.Thanks for the repl :palm:y.

author: MattHollands
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2016, 04:33:57 pm
content: It's damn slow for me too. Really made me dread working on the pcb design for my latest project. So glad it's finished so I can move to kicad. The worst thing for me was that editing a footprint took SO long and then the changes didn't propagate into your layout/schematic for ages.I was under that the impression that rotating a component rotates it around your mouse cursor? Therefore if your cursor is far away from the component then it rotates around a point that is very far from the center of the component and it ends up flying off the screen. I don't have it installed on this PC so can't test, but that's what I seem to remember.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 08, 2016, 09:16:35 pm
content: You get what you pay for. I would not touch the thing with a barge pole I prefer to use KiCAD and make a donation if enough people do that you will have a commercial grade product for not much money.

author: AlexDavidson
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 09, 2016, 10:50:36 pm
content: You are not alone. I also struggled with the way Circuit Maker rotates parts, among many other Altium quirks.The product seems aimed at first-time users and non-professionals. By definition such people are unlikely to have much idea about part creation, yet they are expected to go ahead and create or revise parts that will then be used by everyone. That is never going to work.In my own case, I had to create most of the parts I used (because they weren’t in the community vault), and modify most of the remainder for various reasons (e.g. pads on an 0805 too close to allow a trace between). I didn’t really know what I was doing, so ended up making lots of mistakes and lots of revisions, all of which get published with the potential of messing up someone else’s work.That issue has now come back to bite me too. I recently attempted to revise and improve some of my beginner parts then use them to update a board I made earlier. It simply won’t work. I revise the part, commit it, but when I go to update the part on the schematic it tells me there is a more recent revision made by another user and fails, no matter how long I wait for the vault to update. And no other users have in fact revised the part. The only way I was able to move forward was delete the part from the schematic, place the revised part, and edit parameters to match. Painful.Those sorts of issues, plus the incredibly sluggish performance (e.g. up to 20 seconds waiting for a properties dialog to open – did I really click on the component?), are leading me away from Circuit Maker.Right now I’m in the process of investigating the feasibility of exporting a design from Circuit Maker to Altium Designer. I’m thinking that since I’ve learnt the UI quirks, it can’t be any worse (except for the price). But it’s going to be a lot of work. I can import the schematic but not the pcb layout (fail), and again the parts are problematic. It is possible to create a library from the schematic, but each part still thinks it is linked to the community vault. It took me hours to figure out there is a bug that requires each individual component on the schematic to be opened and edited TWICE to break the link!

author: xjordanx
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 17, 2016, 10:59:17 pm
content: Hi Alex,I'm not sure where you are located. In the US there's almost always a good connection, but there are lots of users in Europe as well where there's less pervasive high speed. The CircuitMaker developers tell me they have found a few areas where there were files being cached or not cached in an optimal way, and redundant SSL calls that could be reduced (SSL slows down any internet connection usage no matter what site or app you're using, as you will be aware). There's an update coming very soon which will dramatically improve the responsiveness.Also, the rotation issue actually was a bug where if you have something selected, then click drag and rotate (with spacebar) a different object, that the object AND the selected items would all rotate. This is really damn annoying. It is being fixed soon too, though internet and speed items are a higher priority for development. The workaround meanwhile is make sure you don't have any idle selections when you're about to rotate a different object - just use the SHIFT+C shortcut to clear the selection first or click in the black/grey background.Whenever you edit a part, that revision (YOUR revision) goes into your Favorites straight away, whereas the common library may take 10 minutes to index the change. Just place the new rev from your favorites.You can import CircuitMaker CMPCBDocs into AD16. There's a file menu Import » AltiumPCB item (it is for CMPCBDoc, CSPCBDoc and PWPCBDoc files from the other tools).

author: AlexDavidson
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2016, 11:55:52 pm
content: Xjordanx, thanks for your comments. I had another go at importing a CircuitMaker pcb design into Altium. Eventually I discovered that I must first create a new pcb document and make it active. Only then does the required importer become available – a point I missed when reading the documentation.However I still don’t get it when it comes to editing parts in CM. Yes I can place a new revision from my favourites, but I can’t seem to get ’Update to the latest revision’ to work reliably, and the ‘Replace’ function only seems to let me choose parts from the vault, not from my favourites.It will definitely lower the frustration level if the developers are able to speed things up as you mention, so I look forward to that.The other area that they need to look at is the feasibility of making the UI a bit more consistent with other software and internally. Quite a few things I thought were bugs turned out to be the Altium way of doing things, e.g. it took me ages to discover that spacebar rotation only works as I had expected if the mouse button is held down. That isn’t the way most other software works. Shift-select is another area that needs work - sometimes all selected items are affected; other times only the first. Then there are the little things, like the way that tabs for layers and libraries/inspector etc are active dark, whereas tabs for documents are the more standard active light.