Altium 20, not having a good time - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Scott_H
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: December 18, 2019, 09:22:34 pm
content: Firstly, let me preface this by saying that I'm a student, not a professional.I've been using KiCad for a few years, got an academic licence to learn Altium version 19. I've made a couple of minor projects in it -still a beginner, but approaching familiarity.Upgraded to version 20 last week - boy howdy.Crashes when you look at it sideways (one seems to be related to docking manufacturer search to the left of the screen?), autorouter shorted out a whole bunch of nets (?!?), but all fixable with a restart or undo.Until last night it decided whilst I was changing the board layout that my entire ground net was not required. All pads on the net were either now unconnected or in the +5v net. The gnd net was not in the netlist, and DRC didn't see anything untoward, despite the little grounds all over my schematics. Could not undo because I'd saved the file (at a guess), so used dropbox rewind.TLDR buggy as, not labelled as a beta, what the hell guys!*Edit to add* - The disappeared ground net was likely due to me shorting out 5v to ground in a schematic. Would have thought that this was worthy of an error to be honest.

author: SerieZ
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 19, 2019, 01:04:35 pm
content: Cannot say the same.I am running Altium 20.0.8 and doing fine (with only the regular Altium spasm once in a while) with quite complicated layouts.I never use autorouter tho.There is no shame in going back to an older Version if that works better for you btw.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 19, 2019, 01:25:29 pm
content: is this the same physical PC you ran 19 on without any issues?Altium is quite notorious for not liking some hardware combinations.Running onboard graphics is something that can cause issues for some people.

author: Pitrsek
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2019, 08:00:00 am
content: The shorted nets should be caught by ERC. Check your ERC settings. The ERC is rather good, if you take time to set it up properly (and have a good library practice to go with). With a proper ERC setup + adding local exceptions, your design should be free of errors and warnings. In my experience it's much more robust and and faster way how to do things, than gutting ERC to absolute minimum. It's surely much cheaper as well.Once I saw a rather big FPGA board that went through 2 extra spins before the designer realised that there are some un-conected pins for DDR controller. ERC was almost disabled...So checking ERC+DRC when working with someone else's board is highly recommended.

author: Scott_H
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: December 21, 2019, 07:10:37 am
content: Thanks all.I agree that it should have been caught, am not fully across how the electric rules check works in the schematic editor - can't see anything in there to catch a +v to ground short actually. Another thing to look at and suss outYes same physical pc, fairly decent graphics card. I had a couple of crashes with it under 19, but nothing worth writing home about. Am still finding that 20 is giving me grief, might take that advice and downgrade.

author: ddavidebor
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 05:29:45 pm
content: You should consider Altium's beta as alpha, and Altium X.0 releases as beta. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2019, 10:51:40 am
content: I have ad20 installed, but don't expect to be using it for a few more months. I tend to lag regular yearly updates till they've had a few patches (and for major updates like ad10 and ad18, I pretty much completely skipped trying to use for real work)That said, some of those errors sound really weird, and may be configuration issues as much as anything else.Also, really, you probably shouldn't use the autorouter.... I don't know anyone who uses it professionally.

author: Scott_H
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: December 28, 2019, 06:38:44 am
content: Fair call on the autorouting - I'm just blown away by how fast and (mostly) sane the routing decisions are in Altium. A layout which would have taken ages in KiCad was finished in less than a minute.I did redo the traces manually in 19 once I had the component layout finalised, if it restores faith in the world

author: Pseudobyte
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 28, 2019, 03:48:24 pm
content: Quote from: Scott_H on December 28, 2019, 06:38:44 amLayout is 80% placement/fanout, 20% routing.