Free or Cheap EDA Tools

Since I got so many interesting responses to the “Why does Mentor Graphics SUCK so Very, Very Much?” post, I wanted to explore some of the low-cost alternatives to “big CAD”.
Not everyone starts learning this stuff in college or on the job. Lots of people (like myself) started out as hobbyists, and how many amateurs can open a vein and produce the  kilobucks for Big Name EDA packages (like “maxiPADS” or whatever), with their a la carte features and rapacious licensing that cost the price of a good used car to use for a year?

So let’s talk about no-to-low cost alternatives.  The list got started in the comments of the “Mentor Graphics SUCK” post, but I’ll restart the discussion with a few of my faves:

• EAGLE by CADSoft is a reliable option. I did my first FCC approved design using it, so I can say it works well .  The free lite version lets you do small boards with a limited pin-count. It has a short learning curve, many user contributed parts libraries can be downloaded, and it’s parts creation scheme isn’t too onerous once you get used to it.  The layout portion isn’t bad at all, either (I had this kidney-shaped key-fob transmitter to lay out, but once I imported a  .dxf of the outline it went very smoothly).  I used the free version for a long time, then bought the pro version and was never sorry about it.
• I did a few small projects using an online layout and PCB fabrication service called Pad2Pad. It’s for laying out straightforward PCBs and getting an instant quote. No schematic capture, though. Still, the pricing wasn’t at all bad for my micro IR proximity detector and your can play with delivery times to slew the cost per board. Good for short prototype runs or one-offs (if you don’t want to smell up the kitchen doing your own etch).
  They have a sister site called eMachineshop.com, which lets you design simple mechanicals in a variety of materials and processes and get instant quotes.  I thought they were both very nifty ideas for the home inventor types out there.
• Just today I  read about Upverter, a new “cloud” toolset for schematic creation.  I don’t see any layout options there yet, but it’s just in beta now. It’s worth a look.
  This crew is feeling our pain from the sound of their “Our Story” tab:  ”They experienced just how terrible electronic design was and swore to just forget about hardware and spend the rest of their lives writing software”.  Preaching to the choir, gang, and well worth a link from me!

So what nifty-keen software tools or services have caught your eye?
Share your secret finds!

Busy, busy, busy!

That’s what a Bokononist says whenever they think about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

The Latest in MLM Quack Products: the “cPRIME Bracelet”

A fellow employee asked if I’d read the latest bogus offer contained in an “all employees” email:

From: XXXXXXXX
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 7:56 AM
To: .All _______ Employees
Subject: check this out!

Though there is no substitution for the actual demo, the video does the best job of showing what and how to do these tests. I will be there at lunch today with a bracelet and you can get these tests done. It will blow your mind and just might make you feel a ton better!

Check out the video on break: watch?v=Kg0WtNz8FGM

Thanks,
XXXXXXXXX

“XXXXXXXXX” was one of the boss’s adult and old-enough-to-know-better daughters. She’d gone from real-estate to MLM scam products, and she was trying to inflict these scams on her father’s employees (with his apparent blessing).  I had a mail rule to dump anything she sends straight into the “deleted” folder after her last sales pitch for a “Molecular Full-Body Cleanse” (or some BS to that effect, complete with scammy infomercial-on-YouTube link).

Now it was the “cPRIME” technomagical confusomatic performance bracelet!  Hey, these are almost scientifical,  with a “chip” embedded in them that could make you run faster and jump higher… for only $100 a pop!  Oh god, the smell of grift is in the air!

Here’s James Randi demonstrating the same kind of bogus “applied kinesiology” test on a “crystal weenie”:

With my co-workers diving to take the keyboard away from me, I fired off a reply, likewise to the “all employees” mail list:

From:
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 8:47 AM
To: .All _______ Employees
Subject: RE: check this out!

Is “.All _______ Employees” intended as a spamming list for snake-oil sales?

Just curious about the policy on this…

Call it the product of utter exasperation.
There is a reason I never make it past 5 years at the same employer.
I’m coming up on the latest 5 year mark now.
I think it shows.

It took scarcely an hour to rack up a whole stream of  “Man, you got great BIG balls! Way to go!” comments from co-workers.  I wasn’t going for “rep” at all (though I was pleasantly surprised by their reactions).  I was just tired of the bullshit.  It was a sleazy sales-pitch to a captive audience, and workers shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of shit.

Maybe my morale is so lowered by this sort of either credulous or fraudulent “marketing” that I just don’t give much of a damn.  Hell, I know it’s the boss’s daughter.  So what?  She doesn’t work for the company, so why is she bothering the staff with this complete bunkum?  Even as a child, when my father took me to work I knew better than to annoy the other workers and try to lie to or cheat them. It has no class to do so as an adult, either.  It is implicitly exploitative.

I noticed a little lump in my “deleted” folder today.   Oh, boy! It was a snippy little retort from the boss’s family scammer “sales pro”:

From: XXXXXXXXX
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2010 9:07 PM
To:  <mynamehere>

Subject: RE: check this out!

Sorry to have invaded your e-mail box. I’m sure I’m not the ONLY one that sends out an e-mail to the whole company. If you are not interested in Girl Scout cookies, tires and wheels, blue and gold sausage, or any of the other things people send out you can simply delete them and let the owner of the company worry about the policy.

Thanks!
XXXXXXXXX

That message hasn’t been read by me, right? The oozing of attitude and sense of entitlement is too thick to cut with a knife.  So I had no reason to send this reply, no matter how hard it was to practice restraint:

I don’t feel “invaded”, XXXXXXXX, only mildly annoyed at being distracted from my work.  It is your daddy’s in-box, technically, and if he wants to let you sully his good name with your sorry-assed sales pitches he is within his rights, no contest there.

I’m sorry you lack the quality of self-reflection required to tell the difference between your own mercenary exploitation of your relationship with your father and school fund-raising, animal rescue, spiritual invocations and so forth between employees of a company, but you’ve apparently been raised a spoiled brat and are now a spoiled adult brat.  Don’t change!  I love you just the way you are.

I have openly asked what the policy is on the use of the company mail system to pitch scam products to employees.  No reply so far, so apparently there isn’t one.  I’ll be kicking off my own line of designer voodoo dolls, herbal nostrums, and “Magic Chicken-Bone Headbands” in the near future.
Watch for the “All Employees” email so you can get in on the ground floor!

For the record, I’m dropping it here, venting it on the blog and nothing more.  If my own daughter were to pull a stupid stunt like this at my company… trying to exploit my employees and destroying the bond of trust, etc, well, it just wouldn’t happen again .  But I am surely NOT my boss.

Rapycin: Promises for Alzheimer’s and Life Extension

Lifetime extending and reverses the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease?  The write-up in PLoS is linked and very interesting. 

http://io9.com/5508523/a-drug-discovered-in-the-soil-of-easter-island-could-cure-alzheimers

 
My granny did the Alzheimer’s thing.  I’d certainly try the rapamycin route, since it’s already FDA approved for suppressing organ rejection.

Natural Gas Funnies!

I got home from work (and last minute Xmas shopping) last night to find that my natural gas had been shut off despite my having made an electronic payment the previous Thursday (thanks sooo much Bank of OK for futzing around!).

Knowing that I’d already paid the damned bill I did the logical thing, and tried to turn it back on at the cut-off valve next to the meter: no dice!  No gas would flow.  So I fired up the electric blanket and put on a sweatshirt for the rest of the evening (only got down to 40F or so) and called the gas company after they opened again in the morning. 

I did find out how they’d dudded my natural gas when they reconnected it:  the pillaging bastages, in addition to just turning off the cut-off valve (shown circled in red, on = the lug aligned with the pipe, as shown) also installed a plug, in the form of a little disk, under the outlet pipe of the gas meter (that would be the pipe at the upper right of the meter, circled in green).  All it took was a quick twist with a pipe wrench.

If you ever do need to turn your gas back on in an emergency, don’t forget to check for that sneaky little plug (and remember to use some soapy water to check for leaks afterward).  The meter will record your “purchase” either way, but you won’t have to wait for The Man to show up, especially since you already paid, right?

“Makers”, by Cory Doctorow

I’d enjoyed BoingBoing for some time before an unforturnate misunderstanding happened there, so I’d been holding off on consuming any of Cory’s fiction for a while.

The reviews I’ve read of “Makers” finally wore me down (that and a link to the free e-book posted at another of my favorite blogs).  So I’m like, okay I’ll give it a try (picture the old “Life” cereal ad: “I’m not gonna try it, you try it!”).

So, I’m like 30 pages in and I’m identifying with several characters, chiefly Suzanne Church, the 40-something “embedded journalist” covering the rise of a disruptive technology wave.  Being barely 40-something myself, with a brief stint at journalism.. and I work with young engineers that sometimes want to hear tales of the “olden times”.  I live this character’s viewpoint frequently.

On page 29, Tjan, a new business manager that’s just joined “Team Perry&Lester” sez:

“The system makes it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you have a really innovative idea, which can’t stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and reinvention too”.

That is something like I was told by the Big Boss at the first electronics company I ever worked for when I was asking about patenting a really neat hack to get around a discontinued chip used on the TVRO systems we made (it was a brilliant hack, replacing a legacy PLL chip with some MECL logic and some discretes: there, I geeked out).  Boss Ed wisely said something to the effect of “don’t screw with patents unless there’s at least 12 million bucks on the table”… and truer words were never spoken.

Patents are worth exactly what you can spend enforcing them; better to invest the effort in keeping your product continually cooler than anyone that wants to rip off your previous work.

So, I’m liking the book so far, and will update as I read along.

My Favorite Post-Apocalyptic Film: “A Boy and His Dog”

One of the the worthless cats* woke me up too early, so I ended up re-watching a favorite old film, “A Boy and His Dog“.  It never fails to cheer me up or chill me out!

A minor snip of Wikipoedia on it:

Blood’s opinion of the human race is not generally positive, and Blood is somewhat of a misanthrope. His opinion of humans may have something to do with the fact that Blood is most likely the most intelligent and learned living thing left in the world, and he looks down upon the “stupidity” of humans. In addition, Blood notes that “human sex is an ugly thing”. Blood does however have a more positive outlook on life in general, and believes in a place untouched by nuclear radiation he heard about from a police dog. Blood refers to this place at various times as “Over The Hill” and the “Promised Land“, where “deer and the antelope play and it’s warm and clean and we can relax and have fun, and grow food right out of the ground.” Blood wants to look for “Over The Hill” with Vic, but Vic does not entertain it as a sensible suggestion. Vic states that their current situation is as good as it gets, and there is no “Over The Hill.”

What can I say,  except to mention that:

• • “Harlan Ellison is God” (or at least should be)
    
  • Footage from “A Fistfull of Rawhide” is featured
  • I’ve got to expand that Wiki entry
  • I don’t know another film with both both Jason Robards and ‘Mr. Kimble’ from “Green Acres” in it (please correct me if I’m wrong).

I keep it on the DVD stack next to “Harold and Maude“, “M” and other classic films.

____________________________________________________________
* worthless, that is, until I need an emergency food source.  “The secret is in the marinade!”

Why does Mentor Graphics SUCK so very, very much?

(C’mon, you knew I was gonna say ‘Well let me count the ways‘, didn’t you?
All  the outrage that follows is couched in light of the limitations of the WordPress interface.
Wordpress is free, so they aren’t disrespecting their customers every moment of every day and
charging them thousands of dollars for it).

So, I’ve been fighting with Mentor Graphics’ DX Designer for the last week or so.  I’d been using Altium Designer previously (and giving them Hell about minor issues, honestly), but the company decided to standardize on Mentor Graphics for PCB design.

I have to say, compared to Altium, using the Mentor Graphics “PADSFlow” (or ‘PADSFlaw‘ as I like to call their abysmal constellation of half-assed software) is like trying to teach a pig to whistle.  The Mentor Graphics product really SUCKS and they know it well (because that is self-evident & I’ve told them so in detail).  I want to share my opinions about it with you (whoever “you” are).  Jesus H. Christ, I get a better user experience with CadSoft EAGLE, the pencil and quadrille paper I was designing with 30 years ago, or even the 80′s version of  “HiWire”  (the very first CAD I ever used).  I could deal with a Windows 3.1 level of user interface, even a DOS 5.0 user interface,  but with DX Designer I feel like my productivity would be better if I was actually PISSING my designs into a snowbank.

The DX Designer user interface is either un-evolved or just plain insulting for starters. Half of the time when I click on the “Help” button it will crash the application, and the times that it doesn’t  the information you need is just not there.  Don’t EVEN bother with the vestigial context-sensitive help icon, it will just open a browser window that tells you to look somewhere else for information.  (This “feature” alone puts Mentor Graphics at the top of my list of nominees for “Death by Mass Rabid Weasel Attack”).  It’s reminiscent of the scene in “Office Space” where they guys are trying to figure out how to launder money by looking up the definition in the dictionary; they found words but not answers.

If you are trying to manipulate a component on a sheet of your schematic but need to rotate it, you’ll need to open a pop-up menu for that component by clicking on one of the pixel-width lines within the component to open the window.  This will likely take you several tries (and that’s after you manage to zoom in on the component, more on that later).  If you are lucky enough to get that darned menu open, then you get to select the “Transform” option, then the “Rotate CCW” option, which will rotate it 90 degrees.  Boy, that sure makes more sense than having a hot-key and a smart selection routine that will grab the component when you click inside its boundary and then rotate it 90 degrees, doesn’t it?  (Please say ‘no’, so the righteous chain-whipping can begin in earnest).

Oh, you’d actually like to connect some components with lines (AKA ‘nets’)?  Here’s another really kludgey part of DX Designer: component pins had better be three grid increments apart or you are going to see your nets do some pretty weird snake-dances on the way (and then they will probably still evaporate like Karl Rove’s wet-dream of a permanent Republican majority after your terminating mouse-click).  Every pin seems to have this mysterious 3-grid “line of death or disfigurement” around it.  Kiss-off your hopes of making a fairly compact-yet-clear schematic in DX Designer or get ready to do the Snake Dance!  (This alone merits the “The Angry Mobs Decapitated Me” dis-merit badge for whoever made this the Mentor Graphics cannon).

Of course, to make a connection you have to be able to see a pin or endpoint clearly, and if, like me, you are working on some middlin’ complex stuff you’ll be needing to zoom in and zoom out at specific points of interest.  Well, DX Designer makes this a “Thing of the Future” by defining “zoom” to mean “zoom to center of sheet”.  Positioning your mouse and using the scroll button gets you a well tempered finger (from Mentor Graphics) rather than a clear view of the circuit element you want to see!  You are going to have to zoom in a little, then fiddle with the scroll bars at the right & bottom of the window, DC al coda.

Say you are working on a banked memory subsystem, with, say 16 each address and data lines (global signals) going to say 8 identical memory devices.  Can you do it one time, then paste copies of all the nets and labels on each memory device?  Not well or easily, unless you copy them off a different page because the idiot DxD product deletes the “global” attribute when you do this within the same page.  Lets count it up: 8 devices times 32 connection, times 4 mouse-clicks to access the local/global ticky-box = carpal tunnel syndrome, high blood-pressure, eye-strain and justifiable homicide.

As Ed Hurlihy would put it: “Time is on the competition’s side when you use DX Designer by Mentor Graphics!”.

Don’t even get me started about the friggin’ “pin files”, the bizarre “HETERO” settings or having to open symbols in MS Word to manually correct bogus default settings and such, the whole “get used to clicking on every signal on your schematic at least 10 times” or the “well, the ‘save + check’ function just barfed a lot of errors, but the error messages in the little  window aren’t linked in any way to the general region of the ‘note’, ‘warning’ or ‘error’ (so if DX is whining about something related to an oftentimes irrational default / invisible attribute conflict you don’t have a prayer of making use of the worthless Mentor Graphics product to find it).

Mentor Graphics is just a waste of time, spontaneously trashing designs.

Hint:  if DX Designer decides to screw up what you are doing…. just delete all the connections, labels and properties you can, then start over again (and again and again…) — it will take less time than finding the source of the problem {eg, your initial purchase decision} and correcting it.

DX Designer is the least capable and most infuriating schematic capture system I’ve used since 1982, bar none.  If you see it coming at you, SHOOT TO KILL or it will steal all your ‘essence’, defile your women, stampede your cattle and give you the Clap.  Yes, DX Designer is that unclean.

At several thousand bucks per seat and in light of the ‘issues’ built into the product (and I can only conclude it was with malice aforethought), if you don’t end up wanting to sue these bastards for gross negligence and misrepresentation, you deserve every bit of malfunction you’ve paid for (Duwane, I hope you are reading this!).

Mentor Graphics should be debarred from selling inside the USA just on the basis of the lack of a usable help system (it sucks so bad only to encourage you to buy their “training seminars” is my guess), the finicky non-response to selecting a net, bus or component, the poorly documented features (like refusing to recognize lower case pin numbers), the really cool way their software crashes leaving your design in ruins and their contemptuous license system (you want to be able to actually look at your CAM output… well, that’s an additional charge, you understand!  Sure, Pads can place/orient parts on a radial grid… but only one at a time, unless you give us even more money… and the blood of virgins, MWUAHAHAHAHAHA!).

Mentor Graphics as a whole, and DX Designer in specific, is either an EPIC FAIL or an EPIC ABUSE (or a continuing criminal enterprise), I can’t decide which.   It is hard to imagine this level of incompetent applications programming (after all these years), the product’s user unfriendliness and unwieldiness and the level of corporate “up yours, Bud” attitude that this product radiates as being anything except an embodiment of everything that’s going wrong in America right now.  Bring in the guillotines!

Does Mentor hire anyone that’s NOT a psychopath bent on destruction? Companies that put out this kind of excrement need to be shut down and their executives and managers blacklisted.  This gang has turned a once pretty okay product into crap, and nobody should pay them to do that again: they should be sentenced to screwing up orders in a fast food restaurant where the angry customers can call them personally to task for their sins, forever and ever amen!

If Mentor Graphics was located in my city, their executives and managers might suffer a much higher than normal rate of unfortunate “accidents” involving falling masonry, flammable substances or large object forcibly inserted into their rectums (as a warning to all who dare follow the ‘Mentor Graphics path to the Dark Side’).  These kind of sub-humans need to have their birth certificates savagely revoked: they steal from all Humanity, even while knowing better.  At this moment Mentor Graphics pisses me off even more than what’s left of the GOP KoolAid mixer/drinkers, the Birthers, the Birchers, the Klan and all those other of wastes of protein:  fuck’em all unto death, I say!

Don’t waste your money or time using Mentor Graphics products, gang!  Save yourself a lot of aggravation by sticking to almost any other product on the market:  it will be just as capable (if not more so) and lots less buggy… or wait for the wintertime, drink a lot of coffee and get your aim honed for action.   You’ll be glad you did.

Some free advertising copy for Mentor Graphics and their DX Designer ( I hearby formally and legally renounce to all parties and for all time the use of the following text by anyone including Mentor Graphics (may their nipples crumble into crusty bits in very public places and to their great displeasure, just because they deserve it for vending such UTTER CRAP as USABLE PRODUCT,  PraiseBob!):

• Mentor Graphics: more SUCK for the buck!
• I just love not being able to zoom to a selected location by default, that’s why I use DxD!
• DxD: Couldn’t we have beaten the ‘outsourced’ people harder to get a useful product?
  
• DxD: where even clicking on ‘Help’ can crash your system
• Dude, it’s totally ‘rad’ and ‘totally random’:  DxDesigner!
• You’ve got time to guess for a living: DxDesigner!
• Tear up your work and do it over again because you use Dx Designer!
  
• DxDesigner, from Mentor Graphics… because the other packages enhance productivity!
• You don’t hate life enough?  Try DxDesigner by Mentor Graphics, it’s ‘Craptastic^©‘!
• Death by a thousand mouse-clicks: Dx Designer?
• When I deleted this component all the buses and signals disappeared, too!  Dx Designer will blow you away!

Derailed… (with an explanation)

Personal issues , 100+F degree weather, an SBIR proposal and an article for “Steampunk Magazine“ (as well as my investigation into low-tech hydroponics)  have had me offline for a bit… (it’s an ADD thing, hope you understand).

I’m re-tooling a different low-tech wind energy approach now, and working on a small-scale “smart grid” application, but expect something on methane digesters ‘real soon now’ (with typical low-tech, ‘tinkerer-sans-garage’ appeal).

As ever,
Offlogic
26 July 2009

Puretch Resist

I finally got to play with PurEtch, a photopolymer etch resist film sold by Cape Fear Press.

It’s easy to use and uses no toxic chemicals: laminate it to your copper/other metal plate under “bug light” (the process is similar to applying sun-shade film to a window), dry it with a hair-drier, attach your transparency artwork, expose to sunlight (about 12-16 seconds at noon), then wash out the shadowed part with soda ash/washing soda solution and etch (see Cape Fear Press site for videos).

Instead of electro-etch, I use H2O2/muriatic acid at 2:1.

First impressions:

1. I’m still not up to the repeatability I’ve achieved with toner-transfer.
2. I think I’ll like this stuff once I get the hang of it.

The two recurrent problems I have (besides working hurriedly to keep cats/dog/family from flipping the lights on in the kitchen) are heating the plates/resist long enough to get the water out (I ruined first plate by over-heating), and leaving it to develop fully (I keep pulling it out early, then battling a transparent residual mask).

I’m sure this will get better as I gain familiarity/confidence with the new resist.