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Altium Circuit Studio Development???

engineereddownunder

My license for Circuit Studio has just come up for renewal, and after just double checking there has been next to no activity in the development world around Circuit Studio - is it worth renewing the license or is this product a dead duck? The last version release was in May last year with apologies for how little it contained and promises of a more major release later in the year - which never came, and which has been followed up by silence (as far as I can tell) from Altium... Thoughts? Anyone seen a recent roadmap for this software? I actually really like the software but don't want to pour money into something that is not being actively developed.

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  • in reply to frog

    Seconding that bump...back using CS after doing other things for past 2 months and thought I would poke around here for any news.  I can't figure out what Altium hopes to gain by treating its paying customers like mushrooms...(and again, this is not aimed at Peter who's the closest thing we have here to a spokesperson and is probably the only reason I didn't give up on CS long ago).

  • in reply to lamabrew

    Sorry to say that there is still no official roadmap to share.

  • in reply to frog

    Agreed, it would be nice to have some news (not a dig at Peter, I'm sure he will post something once there *is* news).

     

    I still suspect that Altium would be better off replacing CS by a pin/layer/size limited version of AD (possibly using the previous year's version for each low-end release to maintain the advantages of the full version). It would almost certainly require much less development time than maintaining the AD and CS codebases separately. They could then simply offer all existing CS licence holders a straight swap to the new software (perhaps subject to having active maintenance) and then end further development of CS.

     

    My suggested limits would be something like:

     

    1) Max 6 Planes, 6 signal layers (so 1-12 layers in total)

    2) Tracks >= 4 mil

    3) Max 10,000 pads/pins/vias (i.e 2x the slowdown limit, but less than the 50,000 upper limit for CS)

    4) No specific upper limit to board size, providing (layers x layer area) <= 6000 cm^2 (so a 4 layer board can be up to 38x38cm, but a 12 layer only 22 x 22 cm). In all cases the calculation would be based on the smallest bounding box that encloses all of the board shape.

     

    In addition a free version could offer 2 layers, 250 pads/pins, tracks >= 6 mil, drill holes >= 0.3mm, boards <= 15cm in any dimension. Upgrading to the low-cost or full version would be just a matter of entering the new licence key (and paying for it, of course!).

     

    Vault access would be an optional paid extra for the free and CS replacement versions

  • in reply to mc6800

    OOh, no!  I would prefer not to have simply a limited version of AD (I used Protel99 and AD6 through AD16). CS is pretty good and better than what you suggest.  I think we all agree that some better communications from them and some indication of future release plans would go a long way.

     

    There were some threads a while ago with features we would like to see added.  I'm sure they are aware of what was requested.  For designer who are doing ECAD and especially PCB design all day, everyday then CS likely isn't powerful or productive enough.  If you do occasional design and especially mostly schematic work it is quite good.

  • in reply to e14softwareuk

    Thanks Peter.  With no disrespect to yourself, that is likely to be read as 'no official roadmap whatsoever'.  To Altium: please say something even if it's just goodbye.