[sdiy] PCB Design Software

[Tim Stinchcombe]

Hi Glen,

> Is anyone familiar with AutoTRAX EDA?
> 
> Version 2.01 came out recently and the full version is 
> available at a special discount, if you act before July 14th. 
> It's currently $95, instead of $495.
> 
> That's a pretty deep discount, but is the software very good? 
> If I understand correctly, it does schematic capture, circuit 
> board layout, and Spice simulation. I currently have no 
> software in those categories, and would like to hear comments 
> from people who might be familiar with this product.

There was an interesting thread on sci.electronics.cad a few weeks ago about
this software:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=7fb54666.03062800
30.6e274236%40posting.google.com&rnum=2&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dautotrax%2Bgroup:
sci.electronics.cad%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dsci.electronics
.cad%26sa%3DG%26scoring%3Dd

(thread was titled: 'Incredible and its free' which might be easier to
search on).

In it there are some not very complementary comments about it's robustness
and what the author is trying to do with it (until a few weeks ago it was
totally free - the thought being that the guy has been trying to lock people
into it, and now is going to hit them by charging for upgrades etc.). The
kind of 'is this any good' or 'what's the best simulation package' question
is often raised there, so with some searching you will probably find various
comments on different packages.

A nice page of links to many packages (but some are about out-of-date) is:

http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/ECADList.html

Tim
__________________________________________________________
Tim Stinchcombe 

Cheltenham, Glos, UK
email: tim102 at tstinchcombe.freeserve.co.uk