Why are CAD tools so hard to use?

By -
Years ago, when IBM was introducing thousands of its employees to the brave new world of object-oriented software, I found myself co-teaching an OO Analysis and Design course to a group of IBMers.

My co-instructor and I were both independent contractors, but we were supported by an old friend who worked for IBM.

After a particularly frustrating practical one of the students asked "Why are we using Rational Rose to draw our designs? It sucks."

The IBMer replied: "All modelling tools suck. It's just that Rose sucks less."

I've just had a similar experience trying to get started with Schematic Editors. I wanted to draw a schematic for the Veroduino - the low-cost, compact Arduino clone that I built a few days ago.

I'd read that TinyCAD was very intuitive. I got going fairly quickly, but could not find a library with all the parts that I wanted. I tried to add a new library of my own; that process turned out to be so intuitive (not) that it crashed the software.

I took a look at Kicad, but a fair bit of work is required to install under Ubuntu, and the software seems to be the work of a single developer.

Eagle was the next port of call. Eagle has become a de facto standard in hobbyist electronics; lots of open-source hardware designs are available in Eagle format, lots of PCB fab shops accept Eagle files, and there is a free version available for non-commercial use. My friend Geoff Drake has had good results with it.

I know I'm going to have to grips with Eagle at some stage, and I've signed up for an Introduction to Eagle for Advanced Arduino Users run by Tinker London next month. I thought I'd have a dry run, so I tried following SparkFun's Eagle Schematics Tutorial on my own.

I worked through the tutorial without problems, but then tried to create my Veroduino Schematic. After an hour I gave up. There were just too many surprises.

Either I am doing things wrong, or the software is very counter-intuitive. I suspect that all Schematic software sucks, but that Eagle sucks less. I hope the course gets me going, but meanwhile I have a dilemma: how can I produce reasonable schematics for the boards I am working on right now?

I've ended up writing a little DSL in Python for producing schematics. It's been fun, and the results look great. I've nearly finished the Veroduino schematic; your should finally get to see it tomorrow

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac
Read more