Anyone with experience with DipTrace? Any opinions on it?

[Madox]

Seeking opinions/views :)

Trying to abandon the Eagle trainwreck.

[James McGill]

Used it for my last project, as I was sick of Eagle's slow pace of
development, and worried about the farnell acquisition.

I freaking love it (windows only aside). It was easy to pick up, and I
was much more productive than on either Altium/Protel or Eagle.

I've made a few PCBs since, and have yet to find any bugs in the
output, including autorouted output. I don't think it's quite as good
as the Eagle router, but it can also hook into a few web based routers
if you're willing to trade time for quality.

I really like the licensing model - the way they restrict the free
version by number of pins makes a lot of sense, especially for me. I
often needed to make boards in Eagle with a mechanical function, so
they were large but had few components. In Diptrace this can be done
with the free version with no problems. The full version is also very
affordable.

The support is also excellent - I e-mailed with a question regarding a
small bug I found, and got an answer + workaround in 24h.

One neat trick is that you can import Eagle libraries, so I sucked in
e.g. the Sparkfun library and my custom libraries, so there was no
real penalty to switching. One thing to watch out for is that it does
not always convert cutouts, which bit me on the USB Mini B footprint
(the Sparkfun header has two little poles that require holes in the
PCB).

I'd love to see Diptrace become the PCB editor for hackers / makers. I
think Eagle, despite a noble start, has really lost their way.

Regards,
James

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 2:57 AM, Madox <mado...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Seeking opinions/views :)
>
> Trying to abandon the Eagle trainwreck.
>

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[Andrew]

I have been using the Labcenter Proteus suite since about 2004
(www.labcenter.co.uk). It also works on a pin-count based licencing, but
also has optional features that can be licenced.

The primary attraction of Proteus is that it includes mixed signal
simulation, so I can develop and test much of my PIC-based PCBs without
lifting a soldering iron.

The VSM Simulation has some fascinating potential. As one simple example,
if you have a circuit that produces audio, you can pump it through a speaker
device that actually plays the sound through your PC. You can hook
simulated microcontrollers to PC serial ports to have them talk to outside
world.

VSM for microcontrollers is an "add on", but very worthwhile if you work
with them a lot.

Andrew