14
galena
3y

It grinds my gears to no end as to how insanely BAD most Electrical engineering software is. Lets start with Tina. A circuit simulator. A few versions ago it was rather good but now it feel like its built upon more legacy crap than fucking Windows! This causes it to have memory access violations and crashes even when you look at it from an odd angle.
On topic of circuit simulation. LT-Spice! It has less errors than Tina but is impossible to use without being lobotomized first. Who the FUCK decided it was a good idea to reinvent keyboard shortcuts by movin all of them to the F-row at the top of the keyboard. Also there is no option to delete a component. YOU NEED TO USE CUT IN ORDER TO REMOVE IT!
And at last Altium Designer for Layouting and Schematics. Whose license costs 9 grand. No one outside of some companies will buy this because of the price. Altium realized this and made two watered down versions of it. Which dont really get updates anymore. (last one was in 2018) So they essentially made a cash grab from people who cant afford their actual product. There also exist other (and a lot cheaper) products than what Altium offers. The problem is that they dont work well with interoperability. Schematics drawn in one program will look distorted in another or not import at all. And since Altium is the industry standard you got yourself this nice steaming soup of impossible collaboration. Its kinda like Adobe being absolute shit at progressing their software just because they got no competition. Or rather they do but the industry wont switch cause adobe is so engraved into it.

Comments
  • 8
    Sounds like you have opportunity and motivation. Go write a better one! Charge for it! Improve other people’s lives and your own at the same time!
  • 9
    Well, they both have initial releases in the 90s. And perhaps they carry on decisions from the 70s.
  • 2
    I like to use kicad instead it works pretty good and is open source
  • 0
    What are schematics exported as in altium?

    Is it xml, json. Or some other format?
  • 0
    Also does it involve a circuit specification language like verilog?

    I'm not at all familiar with this industry so I'm just curious.
  • 0
    @Wisecrack There is a ascii format and a binary format. Both i guess are not really meant to be very open. But there are some programs who got the basics working for importing.
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