Any Altium users?
Jay Kickliter
Posts: 446
I've been using Altium Designer for a few weeks now. I decided to give myself at least two weeks to learn it before asking questions online. So here I am, with several unresolved questions. Any users here?
I've read most of the wiki, watched lots of videos. But I still can't figure out simple things like:
1. Proper page formatting when printing out a schematic, or exporting PDF jobs;
2. Having different routing rules for different next classes.
3. Good 'best practice's for board layers. Such as having the board outline on a mechanical layer vs. the keep out layer.
4. special strings for designator vs parameters. especially since when importing supplier data into a library component Altium keeps multi-word parameter names, but the special strings only seem to link parameter names without whitespace.
Thanks in advance.
I've read most of the wiki, watched lots of videos. But I still can't figure out simple things like:
1. Proper page formatting when printing out a schematic, or exporting PDF jobs;
2. Having different routing rules for different next classes.
3. Good 'best practice's for board layers. Such as having the board outline on a mechanical layer vs. the keep out layer.
4. special strings for designator vs parameters. especially since when importing supplier data into a library component Altium keeps multi-word parameter names, but the special strings only seem to link parameter names without whitespace.
Thanks in advance.
Comments
Leon, I thought Altium has been around a long time; Protel and Pcad? Also, while searching the Internet I kept running into posts by you pushing Pulsonix, which I also downloaded. Do you have any idea how that company is doing? I haven't found much information on them. It looks good, and might switch to that if Altium is really a sinking ship, which their restructuring implies.
I know the people at Pulsonix, they are making a healthy profit and recently moved into a new building. It's a tiny company compared to Altium, with about 12 people (Altium has about 270), and is owned by the staff. They paid off the venture capital used to start the company some years ago. Everyone there used to work for another large PCB software company and left en masse. They bought Number One Systems (Easy-PC) when the company went bust, and made it profitable, whilst developing Pulsonix.
Really? If they have 18k licensees & assuming all are paying annual support fees (excluding any new sales), then their yearly revenue ought to be $27m. Kinda of hard to think their not making any profit when they are just a software company ... anyway, I might be wrong.
As a designer, professional CAD like AD10 and Mentor Graphics will see you a very long way in your career. I choose Altium because of its integrated features. Once you get a hang of it, you wouldn't want to use any others
http://www.google.com/finance?q=ASX%3AALU&hl=en
They are abysmal, and have been like that for years.
275 staff earning, say, $50,000 per annum (it's probably a lot more), comes to about $40 million, with overheads. No wonder they are making a loss.
Give CADINT a try. I think you'll like it. The UI is very natural, and you can be productive with it. I've tried Eagle, PADS, PCAD, Protel, etc., and they all suffer from horrible user interfaces, which make productivity very difficult. I've used CADINT for years and its DOS precursor, EEDesigner, before that and cannot recommend it highly enough.
-Phil
To me, the interface is only about half of the issue. Professional grade routing options and integration with bom is quite important. Easy-PC has a professional grade router for a pretty reasonable price. I currently use diptrace, and am to the point of desiring something else, just hasn't crystallized yet. One advantage I see to Easy-PC is that if you needed to upgrade to Pulsonix, it would be pretty easy.
Diptrace is ok, but there are some serious issues with the way files and libraries are handled, and the auto-router isn't really usable. Also, you can't specify more than one trace width per net in the schematic, which is annoying. The libraries quickly degenerate into my own, and diptrace's, and a myriad of old stuff in my schematics that have orphaned pads, existing somewhere unreachable. Exploring between my libraries in my documents, and the diptrace libraries in program files....
I am curious about mentor graphics stuff, but for me, if they don't list a price on the web, I know I can't afford it anyway.
-Phil
As a self-employed person, I can afford to choose what works for me and makes me the most productive. But when you enter the employment world, you enter the food chain, and you do what you have to to survive. If that means drinking someone else's Kool Aid, it's bottoms up.
-Phil