Capture and Layout

Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.
jan , no just sharing my thoughts on going forward.
Ive been using Eagle for almost ten years, have completed many projects with it but the situtation looks ugly with Autocad's super locked down subscription.
At least I have an alternative with Orcad even if it is an old version. Did many projects with it too but can't run on any of the new windows. Runs under wine and OSX with Crossover.
 
using Eagle for almost ten years......but the situtation looks ugly with Autocad's super locked down subscription.

I have been using Eagle since DOS version 2.6, about 25 years. At the time the Cadsoft USA office was in Boca Raton Florida about a 5 minute drive from where I worked and went to school. I could drive over there for help and bug fixes.

I have made over 100 PC board designs including one that sold over 250K units. I'm still using Eagle 5.11 since pricing structure is now beyond the Tubelab budget. To make matters worse, none of the libraries created in V6.00 or later can be read by my old version.

Has anyone tried Design Spark V8.0 or 8.1? Will it still import old Eagle designs and libraries? I have created a lot of custom library parts in 25 years.

Im looking at returning to orcad capture and layout.

I used the very early Orcad stuff between tape / mylar and Eagle. We used Mentor Graphics and Cadence PCB tools at work. Orcad and Cadence were very similar products at one point, but I never really liked either. That may just be because of 20 + years of driving Eagle and Mentor Graphics.
 
. . . sharing my thoughts on going forward.
Ive been using Eagle for almost ten years . . . .
At least I have an alternative with Orcad even if it is an old version. . . . can't run on any of the new windows. . . .
I don't follow your reasoning. If your out-of-date-but-fairly-recent copy of Eagle is performing acceptably, why would you drop it in favor of an even older copy of Orcad, which is so out-of-date it won't run on a current operating system?

I'm not one to push for the most recent software release without a solid justification. I ran Win2K up until the release of Win7. (In retrospect, probably should have upgraded to XP. Right now my intention is to learn Linux when Win7 becomes impractical.) One of my machines still runs Office 97.

For schematic and layout, I clocked many hours with my copy of PADS (obtained for a freelance gig), then more than a decade with P-CAD due to another gig. Before, after, and between those experiences I had my hands on Orcad, Mentor, Zuken, and a couple others for anywhere from several hours to a few months. Now, software tools DO "wear out" in the sense that the industry requires new capabilities (e.g., controlled impedances or matched trace lengths), truly useful new features appear and accumulate over time, or a program becomes incompatible with current hardware or operating systems. But if a program is doing the job in a satisfactory manner, I understand the motivation to keep it in-service as long as possible.

For three years I have been exclusively on KiCAD, the no-charge open-source schematic and layout software. It has not been easy to learn - perhaps because I kept wanting it to be just like one of the other EDA programs I have used. (Version 5, expected for release this summer but in preview now, promises to remove some of those learning barriers.) Even so, I can turn out work that is every bit the equal of what I did in P-CAD or PADS. And if I have a need for modern features like matched lengths, 3-D modeling, or a 24-layer board, those features are just waiting for me to learn how to use them.

Dale
 
Well two reasons to go back to orcad v9, looking at the finished products, the orcad boards just look beter.
The other is how simple it is to change a library part while using layout or capture.
I really like that. Eagle is not difficult to do same but orcad is just cleaner. The "free shared libraries" are off grid etc and with version compatibility issues. So I usually end up having to create a new part anyway. That too is cleaner on orcad.
 
. . . . The "free shared libraries" are off grid etc and with version compatibility issues. So I usually end up having to create a new part anyway. . . .
As a matter of course, I expect to spend anywhere from 20% to 90% of the total effort on a board layout, doing "library work".

I wish there was some reproducible way to rate a program's tools for creating symbols and footprints. I think that anybody (or any company) who does more than two or three boards ends up creating and maintaining their own libraries of symbols and footprints. Even so, the marketing hype tries to convince us that an EDA program with 2 million parts in its library is at least twice as good as the program with only 1 million. The people who have never laid out a board (e.g., managers, IT, and inexperienced novices) fall for this kind of hype.

Just once, I'd like to see a program that says,"We give you a library of a couple thousand parts to get started. After you've done your first board, you'll know how to make your own symbols and footprints with little effort.".

Dale
 
I have been using ORCAD for well over 10 years now. It has its quirks too. I have an extensive library that I can share if anyone is interested.
Orcad Layout is now defunct as well since Cadence abandoned it to use Allegro Technology. Allegro was originally designed by Valid, yes I am dating myself here :)
Every CAD package that I used professionally, we never used the libs that came with the package, they all were lacking in certain criteria's.

Has anyone tried Design Spark V8.0 or 8.1?
I gave it a go, when I could not get Orcad going on win10. It has its issues, similar to all of them. Another tool that I did not like their libraries.
I also tried DIPTRACE, I thought it was strange that they had no way to create placement outlines for placement DRC rules. Basically components could overlap each other with no DRC violations. I did write to them which of course, i received no response :) I really wonder if these folks writing eCAD code ever designed pcbs for a living.
We used Mentor Graphics and Cadence PCB tools at work. Orcad and Cadence were very similar products at one point
I am not sure what exact s/w packages you are referring to. Allegro and Orcad layout are 2 totally different animals. I know they kept Orcad schematic capture alive but Orcad layout is dead, ended at v16.? a few years back now.
I know Motorola liked to use Mentor from long ago, so did HP when I designed pcbs for them. At one time we were using Cadence Allegro, until our lab was bought by HP, we were forced to scrap Allegro and go on Mentor BoardStation training in SanJose. Board Station is now old hat after Mentor bought the parent Co.(Veribest) that has Expedition, which is now the high end std. Expedition's core goes way back to the days when we ran pcb layout on Sun 4 workstations using Cadnetix.
My history of ecad library translation shows that they are faulty. You are better off re-creating from scratch and working off templates.
 
Last edited:
Dale, you have hit the nail square on its head in your assessment of libraries in general.

"After you've done your first board, you'll know how to make your own symbols and footprints with little effort.".

Maybe a few more boards under your belt to become a good librarian. Usually you find out how good a job you have done is when the sub contract mfg reviews your design to verify its manufacturability and what the yields turn out to be :)
 
Yes, I'm interested in your libraries.
I too will share all of the old projects once the directory is fully populated.

I have to retrieve the projects from an old archive, I unzipped it last year as a test and is intact.
I'll let you know when ready. Some you may not want. They are mostly industrial controls with 2,4, and 6 layers.
I had a draftsman and he did most of the daily work but I checked everything. I would do at least one or two personal audio boards a year on my computer just so I knew the products.

'Going back' means making the orcad working dirs part of my daily backups. So the bottom line is I'm re-instating V9(capture 9.1 and layout v9) for any new boards including the one I'm working on now. Running on the old Vista HP laptop for now until I'm 100% sure no issues with emulators.
 
I was in your same situation until my old Vista HP laptop and HP desktop XP machine(DC5100) both died last year. This is a big problem you will probably be faced with eventually unless you can get emulators to work.
I will not need any of your ORCAD designs/libs because I have my own ways to create libs. If I took your libs, I would just have to re-do them to match my methods.
I can supply you a sample of my capture libs to look at, to see how I make them. It is part of a process, which you may wish to adopt.
For example, every component is unique, since I add properties like mfg/distributor part numbers so that the BOMs can be loaded into Mouser with very little editing. It is a huge time saver for me. Like Dale said libraries are a big part of the whole design effort. Making them efficient is important to minimize total design time.
 
Last edited:
Remember the rolling green hills and blue sky? I did a cold install on old xp laptop, everything is working so far. Ignore that junk design shown, it did not work.
 

Attachments

  • junk.JPG
    junk.JPG
    242.7 KB · Views: 151
Just once, I'd like to see a program that says,"We give you a library of a couple thousand parts to get started. After you've done your first board, you'll know how to make your own symbols and footprints with little effort.".

Dale

I just provide basic libraries 7400 TH, 7400 SMD, 4000 TH, 4000 SMD and a general purpose library with lots of discrete components.
I then provide component wizards where you input a few parameters into a table and it makes the components for you. It does this with SIL, DIL, QUAD and round valve bases.
You can input anything else by hand, a little tedious but I often find I can pinch something already made, alter it and put it into library under new name.

With the components already in the library I have made 250 different pcb's.
PCBCAD51.
 
I am not sure what exact s/w packages you are referring to

I'm not exactly sure either. I have been in several different product development groups over the 41 years I was at Motorola. In all of them the engineers (me) were not allowed to touch a PCB design. There were dedicated layout people for that. I did RF work, which is not exactly something that you just turn an autorouter loose on. We engineers would input the schematic in whatever the tool of the day was, then when a dedicated layout person was available for our job, we would sit with them and show them exactly what needed to go where. In the 80's and early 90's the tools being used changed often, and varied with each different group.

I have also worked in two different "think tanks" a research group, and a test fixture construction group where we did our own boards and had far more freedom to choose what tools we used. The test fixture group used tape and mylar. Schematic was paper and copy machine. This was mid 70's.

Since then there were several groups each with different tools. I remember using Orcad in the paging group in the 90's, then Cadence a few years later and thinking that the schematic tools looked very similar, but I could be wrong about which was which.

Sometime in the late 90's Motorola decided the there would be ONE electrical engineering tool for the entire company, which was the Mentor Graphics tools. Despite that edict I used Eagle for my test boards and fixtures in the research group that I worked in for the last 12 years of my career. Other engineers also had their own personal choices, and the rules were overlooked, unless the board could someday go into production, or be sent to another group.

Sometime around 2010 they decided that "thou shalt use Cadence," because it was far cheaper than Mentor. I did exactly one 10 layer HDI board in Cadence before I left the company in 2014.
 
In all of them the engineers (me) were not allowed to touch a PCB design. There were dedicated layout people for that. I did RF work, which is not exactly something that you just turn an autorouter loose on. We engineers would input the schematic in whatever the tool of the day was, then when a dedicated layout person was available for our job, we would sit with them and show them exactly what needed to go where. .

In the first electronics company I worked at there was a draughtsman who laid out pcb's using clear film and tape.
I watched him do it and he simply laid out a pcb as however it went down easiest.
Luckily most of the circuits he did were not critical and he got away with it.

In the world of audio he would have made a mess of things.

My experience of laying out pcb's started with none critical power amps.
However, the first time I laid out a audio mixer + power supply I came properly unstuck. With the input shorted I was getting 1 volt peak to peak hum on output. It turned out I had mixed in power supply ground with audio ground and the charging impulses into smoothing caps was modulating the audio ground line !
I redid the pcb keeping power supply complete separate and used star ground technique. The pcb came back and worked very well.
 
who laid out pcb's using clear film and tape.

I laid out all sorts of things using Mylar, tape and 4:1 stick on images of all the popular DIP sockets. I did a MC6809 processor, a graphics board, and an 8K memory board (64 X 21L02 chips plus glue and interface logic) for the SS-50 bus in the mid 70's. Both worked fine.....of course that bus ran at a blazing 2 MHz when overclocked!

I still have a few of the C band satellite receiver boards I did in the mid 80's. They were the some of the last tape and mylar boards I did.
 
Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.