Valt Exception Failure

Yep, for me the vault is very flaky.  If I use the vault within a minute or two of having it open (and then closed) about 50% of the time CS will either crash with an exception like you've described, or will go into an endless loop of showing a dialog with progress bar.

Personally I think the whole vault concept needs to become far more polished before I'd be willing to use it as anything more than a convenient place to copy parts out into my own library.

My work around at the moment for the vault is:

- Save everything you need saved (about 50% of the time it will crash and everything from the last save will be lost.)

- using a sacrificial PCB project

- Open vault, find the part you need, add it to the project

- copy the schematic symbol into your own sch library

- copy the footprint into your own library.

- delete the sacrificial project

- restart CS.

Obviously this is a PITA, so I only bother where the time taken to do all this is significantly less than just making the components from the datasheet.

I have also had the same problem just trying to work through the "From Idea to Manufacture - Driving a PCB Design through CircuitStudio".

I get as far as placing two transistors and two resistors and CS crashes with the DXP.exe error or an application error "UniqueIDPrimitiveInformation" could not be found.  It would not be so bad if the program didn't crash and you could retry.  I'm glad I signed up for the trial instead of forking out the $1000 for the program.  Also my email to Newark support has gone unacknowledged.  Bad product and bad support.

Bob Bambic wrote:

Bad product and bad support.

Well, I agree that their support could be better.  E.g. why hasn't anyone from e14 or Altium piped in to this discussion?  They make quite a point of saying to contact them if you have any questions, yet it seems to go unanswered...

However, I can't agree with you in it being a bad product.  The vault isn't production ready, that's pretty clear.  But the whole vault idea I don't really buy into so I don't see it as particular terrible problem.

I've spent quite a bit of time lately trialling all the "low cost" PCB CAD packages available at the moment because I'm now in a position where I don't have an employer giving me a higher end package.  CS is lacking some of the features I'd gotten use to in higher end packages, but in my opinion it's the winner in the price category.

My second email to e14 got a reply today. Basically the crash report is in the hands of the developers and they are working on the issue.  I hope they can get it fixed before my trial is over, 2 weeks to go.

I don't have any experience with Altium other than through this demo.  When the program crashes repeatedly during the beginning of their own tutorial it gives me the impression of being a bad product.  I know that Altium is popular and I have to assume it doesn't crash like this.  I have used Eagle a bit but I am not fond of the interface.  When I saw CS available for less than the Eagle full package it seemed like a great opportunity to learn Altium.  I am assuming the skills learned would transfer to the designer package and be a good resume bullet point.  Are there any Altium libraries out there that could be used instead of the vault?  Maybe I will abandon the tutorial and try to cobble something together with the limited built in library to get a feel for the program.  Thanks for your comments.

Hello all,

   Yes, I received a message that they would look into the problem(s).  I am out of my 30 days, hope it get's fixed.  You all will have to test and tell me if it's fixed.  The main program works fine!  Something wrong with the Vault program.  I am looking forward to their response!

Thanks to you guys for testing and reporting - saves me the trouble - some of the whizzy features look appealing but if it doesn't actually work then what's the point ?

I don't know why Altium have gone off the rails so much - but software at this price level just shouldn't crash.

MK

Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!  The rest of the program is very good, carefully thought out and detailed!!  The vault program needs some help.  Once they do that, I think the package would be great for almost anyone except the big companies that want/need to have many, many engineers working together on projects.  The Vault program is different from the rest of the program in that it is more of an internet database search engine.  Doing searching funneled through the internet takes a different style of programming.  I am sure they will get it working and the UI bullet-proofed soon.  It seems that there are many people waiting for them to fix the Vault program.  I am looking forward to seeing what they come up with!!