A Modest proposal...

[Theo]

Great idea!

Problem will be picking a package.
I'am only familliar with orcad, ultiboard and eagle.
Eagle seems to be missing things like spice intergration and good auto
routers, among others.
Beside that (at least for me) the interfase seems to work slower than the
other two.
Orcad and Ultiboard have nearly the same user interfase,
a historical thing somewhere around 1486 I used a package that
existed of a schematics program named orcad and a layout program named
ultiboard.

Both UB and Orcad seem fairly complete, however Orcad is fairly exspencive
and
the entry (home/student) versions of ultiboard lack gerber support.

I use a entry version (no disign limmit) of UB for some years now,
innitially there was a misterious printer problem beside that the thing
works really good.
Especially the included auto routers (o.a. spectre) and the lage shape
library are nice.
However the lack of gerber output turns out to be a real pain in the aß
if you want more than kitchen sink PCB production.

Resently UB joined with Electronics Workbench.
I didn't have the honnor to try the new version jet.
So far i understood there is no longer the need to back annotate,
think we should call that a good thing ;)

Here is my personal wish list of what a pcb package should do:
1) No board size or pin limmit (500 pins is way to low).
2) Gerber support.
3) Auto routing, minimal specter, (shape-based would be cool).
4) Large shape lib, just hate shape editing.
5) Spice intergration.
6) Good ergonomics (true a subjective point,
       in my opinion both Orcad and UB with a 3 button (scroll)
       mouse come close to good).
7) Automatic polygon/plane update.
8) Documentation support (i.e. BOM, drill map)
9) Disign rules & rule check.
10) Complete set of placement tools; ratnests, force vectors, histograms.
11) Cheap, say under $200,-


Cheers, Theo


----- Original Message -----
From: Hairy Harry <paia2720 at hotmail.com>
To: <synth-diy at node12b53.a2000.nl>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 9:04 PM
Subject: A Modest proposal...


> I was thinking:
>
> Everyone needs some kind of schematic package... usually with
> some PCB ability. I wonder if some company would be willing to
> site-licence synth-diy members...
>
> The idea is we get a discounted price on a basic package.
> Just like the big boys do.  They'd get to sell packages to
> people who might not otherwise buy them...
>
> We get to (oh boy here it comes...) standardize on software
> we can all swap...
>
> we can probably make a deal where we would have one contact
> person to handle factory support, so they would not be bothered
> by newbie questions... just genuine bugs...
>
> I thought of this when
> 1) Design works lite demo ran out
> 2) Eagle lite might be too restricted in PCB size...
> 3) Everyone likes to trade schematics
> 4) I already know about 4 cad packages and I'm getting tired of
>     learning a whole bunch more...
>
> H^)  harry (comments???)
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