Altium Circuit Studio RoadTester

Thank you again to element14 for selecting me to review Altium’s Circuit Studio software. This was timely since I have spent the last year looking at different PCB design tools. I’ve been itching to get my hands on this so let’s get started!

I just received the registration code via email and have not applied it yet. In anticipation, I installed the trial and have started some preliminary items. I’ll post on those soon.

Allow me to provide a quick introduction in this post. I’ve been designing PCBs for a long time. I started out as a Junior in high school designing PCBs use dry transfer sheets and ferric-chloride acid to etch the single and double-sided copper-clad boards. Over the next few years, I made several boards ranging from a power supply to a speech synthesizer board for my 8-bit computer which I then programmed to say out “Shall we play a game?” which sounded quite a bit like the movie Wargames. My sister was not so impressed. She wanted me to quite programming the computer and actually play a board game with her.

Then I enlisted in the military and was trained to become an electronics technician. Between a full time job and going to school in the evenings, my hobbies went to wayside. Once I got my Electrical Engineering degree completed, I quickly got back into building things I wanted, but couldn’t find. I followed the typical process – breadboard or wirewrap or protoboards to build my designs, and I made one or two PCBs, but not too many.

About ten years ago, I wanted to design a circuit to go inside a hollow joystick handle. I prototyped the circuit on a breadboard and thought about how to make a custom PCB to fit this tight space. It would require a something smaller than the through-hole DIP parts I breadboarded the circuit with. So, I looked at some of the PCB ads in a couple of popular magazines and decided to try a free PCB design tool. I don’t recall which site it was, but you know the pitch – the SW is free and “ordering your PCB from us is as easy a clicking a button.” Sadly, I couldn’t fit the circuit on a PCB small enough and still route the traces on the PCB, so the project fell to the wayside. That free software wasn’t much better than the dry transfer technology I used years earlier. Routing traces was completely a manual affair.

Eventually I decided to give computer-aided PCB design another attempt. I tried Eagle first. I was sorely disappointed with the user interface. I felt I was constantly fighting the user interface to do what I wanted to do. The forums seemed filled with similar comments, but the comments were always along the lines “can’t complain for the price”, but time is valuable too and I don’t want to waste it fighting a poor user interface.

Then I switched jobs about four years ago. My new employer had Altium Designer. Since it was a small business, the engineers did everythingit all – PCB design to project management. Altium Designer was the tool I had been looking for. Yes, it crashed on occasion and some the UI was a bit obtuse, but I was working on designs with a multitude of layers that were extremely densely packed with tiny parts (0201 anybody?). I was in our lab when somebody walked in to talk with a technician who was working under a microscope. This person swiped the benchtop to “clear off the dust” and the tech yelled “those were parts – not dust!” I was with that company for three years and the biggest design I personally worked on had 32 layers, over 3,000 parts, and was about 6 inches square. I couldn’t have done it without Altium Designer. A big bonus was Altium allowed me to install the same software on my home PC and associate it with my employer’s license. When I wasn’t working on that monster design, I used it to complete about a dozen personal designs and had the PCBs fabricated by OSHPark. I then assembled the boards myself. I made libraries of parts I used in my designs, I tried the internal router and an external router, I made two-layer and four-layer designs. I made a four-layer design with length-matched traces for a differential pair in the circuit. In short, I used it to quickly gain proficiency in the skills I used on the job. When faced with something new on the job during the day, I would think up a small circuit and design a quick PCB to test these new approaches. I was able to complete some of these designs done in about an hour’s time from start to submit. Then, I could look at the results a few weeks later when the PCBs arrived. This saved a ton of time on my job as I quickly learned what worked and what didn’t.

In order to use OSHPark with Altium, I had to figure out how to export the correct files and package them so OSHPark could use them. I even made a handy guide for myself to streamline the process. I will do the same thing for Altium Circuit Studio and upload that file here. That will allow RoadTest readers to quickly submit designs to OSHPark without the trail and error I had to go through with Altium Designer.

Then I left to work for a new company as a project manager / systems engineer. Which meant I had to leave Altium Designer behind. I started to look for a new PCB design suite since I can’t justify the expense of an Altium Designer license for my hobby designs. I shunned Eagle given my prior experience. I downloaded DesignSpark, installed it and worked with it a bit, but I didn’t care for it either. I was looking at DipTrace when this RoadTest appeared. I tried to import one of my personal Altium Designer projects into it, but it didn’t work quite right. My net groups were lost along with the trace widths I set in Altium Designer for each net group, so the PCB won’t route at all in DipTrace using either of its internal routers nor with the external Freerouter. As I use DipTrace, I have found myself missing some of the Altium Designer user interface aspects, but aside from import issues (which could be as much Altium Designer as DipTrace), I have found it very usable.

In this RoadTest, I will update another one of my Altium Designer projects in Altium Circuit Studio. I have a design that requires a new In Circuit Serial Programmer (ICSP) interface for a microcontroller on the PCB. I tried to use a third party proprietary connector in the design, but I have since decided to go back to a typical six pin header on the PCB. It is a minor change, but this will exercise the ability of the Altium Circuit Studio to import a design. This board also has some custom footprints in a library I made for Altium Designer, so I will get to see how well those libraries work in Circuit Studio. Then I’ll need to re-route the board and generate the gerbers to fab the PCB at OSHPark.

Then I will also create an entirely new design with the idea to use only parts already in Altium Circuit Studio’s library of parts and reflect on the experience of finding the correct parts and how good those footprints are. I also have an idea for a third design that I will hopefully get to within the period of this Roadtest. Throughout, I will try reflect on the user experience from a professional’s viewpoint, but while keeping the new user in mind. 

So, my plan is to post weekly updates on my experiences and progress. At the end of two months, I plan to have a complete review in place.

I look forward to getting Altium Circuit Studio and sharing my experience with all of you. I hope you enjoy reading the posts!

Cory