4/20/2021 0 Comments Circuitmaker Cost
If Altium want to sell something that costs less than 7000 (maybe 200-500 for a perpetual license like Eagle) they will either have to: (a) Take far less money from their existing 7,000 customers or.While theres definitely room for better software, the most frustrating thing about the PCB CAD ecosystem right now is (a) lack of interoperability between file formats (for schematic, layout, and gerbers), and (b) lack of publicly accessible components.It is a huge pain to build tons of component symbols and footprints for each design.There are large EE companies that employ people just for this task The idea of paying for more extensions seems incredibly frustrating.
Circuitmaker Cost License Like EagleIve been getting my feet wet again; perhaps Altium has fixed the UX which drove me away originally but they dont seem (until now) to have had any entry-level appropriate pricing. And whilst I could pick up Eagle 7 recently and get productive again real quick, the fact that I still had to draw my own PCB footprints which are intrinsically inseparable from the overall component definition is so disappointing. A separate PCB footprint library, separate in the sense that component packages should be normalized and trivially re-usable across devices without error-prone copy-pasta madness seemed painfully obvious 10 years ago and its still painfully obvious now. Drawing a new schematic symbol and wiring that up to physical pins in a PCB footprint is no big deal, but I just hate having to draw a new PCB footprint from a datasheet. Even on the off-chance that you can copy-paste from some other device with similar enough package, you still end up with inconsistent silkscreengate naming conventions etc. The incompatibility bt PCB design tools and resources is farcical. Unfortunately, software like web frameworks and office productivity gets so many more eyeballs than PCB design software. A single copy of gEDAAltiumEagleOrcadKicad can produce a piece of hardware that one billion people use. You could say the same for a single copy of Word, but people own and interact with thousands of different documents, but only a handful to a dozen PCBs and most people are using the same ones (iPhone, laptop motherboard, etc.). Circuitmaker Cost Free Tools CanAs more hobbyists engage at the Arduino level, simple, free tools can open up a bit. I dont see this free(asterisk) offering from Altium as any more than a freemium pattern to divert marketshare from Eagle in particular. Its 3d board viewer is a gimmick that hooks a lot of people, but its not as critical as having the proper components. PCB design, there are numerous free tools: and heres a brief overview of them. Not knowing what threshold of diverse and challenging triggers purchase enhancements makes this something I have no interest in being locked into. If they had a list of add on functionality with price, sure, but unspecified No way. Circuitmaker Cost For Free Or IsDoes the autorouter come for free Or is it a 1000 add on Component library Board size limitations Number of layers 3D modeling IDF export and import Putting arbitrary graphics into the silkscreen Heck, gerber file export Website is way too light on information for me to touch this with a 10 foot pole. If I could convert an Altium library to Eagle, well, that would be the last year I spent money on software licensing. You end up with this investment of time in libraries that are vendor-specific. Thats what keeps most of the EEs I know with one software package or another. Big companies have a librarian who is in charge of the official part libraries. But if you could easily port an OrCAD library to Altium or Eagle or whatever, that would be a game changer, I think. Isnt that Altiums existing model And for all features, the upfront cost is about 7000 per user Its not an unreasonable price for big companies (if it boosts the productivity of an engineer costing 100k) but theres a lot of people who arent going to spend 7,000 (anyone who isnt doing PCB design full time as a profession).
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