Altium Circuit Studio Development???

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).

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

https://www.altium.com/careers/positions -> seems they are hiring, but for what???

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

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.

While we are griping, here is my list of features I would like to see considered for addition.

Maybe time for another poll like we had in 2017?

1) Add Sch List panel like in AD; provides a selectable list of schematic parts by ref des; this is similar to what is in PCB

2) In schematics and PCB; Find (and select and edit) similar objects

3) Overall; add Project packager wizard; allows easy creation of zip file of critical design files for archiving

4) In PCB; Improvements to 3D capability including Free (unattached) 3D body support instead of just 3D bodies on components, measurements in 3D

[Found out you can do this with a command that is not on the tool bar.  When in PCB and 2D mode, use the Search box to type in Place.  It should autocomplete with a selection for Place 3D body.  This becomes a free 3D body rather than one associated with a component. When in 3D mode, place commands are available for moving and orienting the model.]

However, we used to have a way to define a board shape from a 3D body and that was lost to us from ver 1.3 to 1.4.  It would be nice to have that function back.

5) Overall; CAM viewer integration like in AD

6) In PCB; improved Polygon Pour manager

7) In PCB; Place a proper layer stackup table in the drill/fabrication drawing; current workaround is to make a separate drawing using screen shots or export it as a separate Excel file.

8) In PCB; Add teardrops to selected PCB routing

9) In PCB; Upgrade component footprint wizard to IPC compliant version. The one in CS is OK but I miss the one from AD

10) In PCB; Add ability to define a few custom layer sets; [actually we got this in May 2018 release 1.5]

11) In PCB; add a shortcut/ hot key to switch metric and imperial; curiously this presently does this in PCB library editor’s pad window with CTRL-Q

     [we sort of can do this with Alt-h G M or Alt-h G I;  so I'm happy enough and would prefer to see other features ahead of this.  But it would be nice is CTRL-Q toggled imperial and metric throughout the PCB windows]

12) Bug fixes; especially the recent Vault searching issues; CS start page showing Error 404; CircuitStudio Start page is showing "404 Not Found"

[not sure when or how but the CS Start page problem went away for me and the Vault searching problems were fixed]

13) PCB rule generation; improve the Rules Wizard to a) allow editing of the rules scope of an existing rule and b) add in more of the query keywords that Altium Designer has.  For 'a', existing rules scope can be editted by exporting the rule to a *.rul file and modifying in a text editor and then importing back.  It would be easier if there was a way to open the rule scope directly from within CircuitStudio and modify it using the rules wizard menus.  Also, would be nice to add in 'OR' logic to the existing 'AND' logic for combining the keywords to build more specific rule scope.

[edits to my post done on Nov 11, 2019 and Nov 27, 2019]

[June 2, 2020] See my updated wish list here...

Wishlist for CS?

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.

Bumping this one again, I'm using CS fairly constantly now and finding a few more bugs along the way, the latest seems to have started after a Windows update. Uninstalling the update has fixed the problem for me but has left me thinking we haven't even had any minor bug fix updates for what must be around a year now... As mentioned above - ALTIUM PLEASE TELL US SOMETHING EVEN IF ITS GOODBYE! Despite a few current flaws I really love this product and I think it fills a really important space in the market, so really hoping we are going to see something very soon but unfortunately we're at the point where I think we need to start looking for a good alternative.

We tried Circuit Studio for about a year, then went back to Eagle since it was bought out by Autodesk and seemed to be getting more support than CS. I'm not trying to troll, but occasionally I will come back to these forums to see if we made the right decision. And boy did we ever.  Eagle has been getting at least 4 or 5 updates each year which are starting the fill the holes that Eagle previously had with Cadsoft that made us reach out to CS.  I agree that CS is a much more sophisticated tool than Eagle, but without support, we were struggling and were also worried about the lack of a future plan from Altium and Element14 for the product.   This is just my 2 cents.

Sorry if this has been asked before....Since there is no word on development and Altium AD is well above most people's price range, has there ever been talk of aggregating users to share a single seat of AD?

I know there'd be so scheduling hurdles but maybe if the users were from different parts of the country or world the conflict might be a minimum. I am not familiar with all the technical limitations of Altium's licensing program so it might be a moot point from the git-go but I thought I'd ask you fine people.