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Altium CircuitStudio Community Poll

Altium CircuitStudio Poll –

Altium and the e14 Software Team would love to get your feedback on CircuitStudio and PCB Design Tools overall.

Congratulations to the 5 lucky community members who won Altium CircuitStudio Poll subscriptions in our Community Poll.

The competition has now closed but feel you have not given your feedback yet? There is still time to enter this poll!

 

 

 

 

Thank you for taking the time to answer the questions in this survey, it really helps us to get a sense of how you use your software, areas you feel would be most impactful to you for improvement and to give you an opportunity to provide that feedback in a targeted way.

 

This poll was a competition which has now been drawn. For more info see announcement in the comments below.

  • Do you feel CircuitStudio provides enough functionality for the price paid?

    Well, yes... but some features like Nets Classes or Multichannel functionality is mandatory I think.

  • The best part of me in CS is its closeness on Altium Designer (I used to us) and to CircuitMaker (I have used recently). So interfaces and tricks are familiar.

    What I'd like to see is better compatibility for component/footprint sources. Although the quality of components in Octopart is generally not so good, It could be used as starting point. Interface to Ultralibrarian would be a big step forward.

  • in reply to e14softwareuk

    Any kind of brief acknowledgement of bug reports and/or suggestions for workarounds would give us users some hope.

  • in reply to optoeng

    Can't disagree with you as these are valid points. This is a community site so there is a balancing act between CS Support trying to answer every single question and letting users share their experience, in the past it may have been too much one way but hopefully we are now shifting the balance by offering more direct answers. For urgent queries we do offer email support directly. I think everyone would agree that the documentation is a 'work in progress', CS is a fairly new product offering so the documentation is still catching up. It is improving all the time and very shortly (next week hopefully) a great new video tutorial series will be released on here, watch this space as they say! The bug reports are appreciated, the software developers do monitor the forum posts and this does feed back into creating a better product.

  • in reply to e14softwareuk
    Your posts might be a good beginning. You will note that most posts to the forum have had no response from CS 'support'. I will use this opportunity to mention another serious issue. The 'Help' system for CS, such as it is, dumps the user into a strange land of old and new webpages, most of them for earlier versions of Altium Designer. With luck, you might happen onto some useful piece of information, where AD and CS share some feature and interface. Most often, you end up frustrated by the differences, including features that seem to work but actually are not functional. See my post about renaming layers for an example. (For convenience, and to give you the flavor of this bug, I'll mention here that layers M15 and M16 end up being named CourtyardTop and CourtyardBottom in CS output.)
  • in reply to optoeng

    Paul, I'm sorry to hear that you feel you have not received good support. Checking your posts as suggested you seem to be joining in the community spirit of the site providing help and hints to other users and where there are actual software issues / bugs these do get passed back to the developers so that future releases of CS can keep improving. If there is something specific you feel we can do to provide better support then please feel free to let me know.

  • in reply to e14softwareuk

    As far as I can tell, support for CS is nonexistent, so I hardly know where to begin. You can read my Forum posts for more input.

     

    Paul Mathews

  • in reply to erix

    Hi erix, this is Peter from element14, a software applications engineer at Premier Farnell. I just wanted to offer support regarding any issues that you may be experiencing with CircuitStudio. If you have an unlimited update subscription then you should receive software updates as they are made available, if this is not the case then please email me directly or software@element14.com with your details. There is certainly no shortage of support available to all CircuitStudio users, there are these forums where users can share experiences with each other, your can email us at software@element14.com or even telephone your regions technical support desk. Please feel free to reach out to us, we are here to help!

  • I didn't know how lucky I had it as a former AD user at a previous employer. My user account was reliable, updates installed automatically, support was readily available. I thought I would have the same experience as an early adopter to CS however that is not the case. Even though I was gifted unlimited subscription for CS I can't get updates, my CS account seems to be different than the AD account, and help is hard to find...

    I understand the need to keep AD the premier product (with the price tag to reflect that) but it seems to me more and more that CS (and the lack-of-service model) is DESIGNED to frustrate and guide users to the more expensive product.

    1. Fix the bugs, especially with regard to licensing and subscriptions. You've figured it out with AD, why is it so hard with CS?

    2. After the bugs are fixed, consider  adding functionality ala cart. Why build it if nobody will use it?

    3. Eagle used to be a much better value. It limited board sizes and component counts based on purchase price and it just plain worked all the time. Now that Autodesk purchased it, it is almost certain to be more screwed up than CS relatively soon. There is now a golden opportunity for Altium to pick up defecting Eagle users but you have to have a reliable product , a bulletproof licensing method, better documentation for the defectors, and a more robust support system.

  • As others have said, fix the bugs would be handy. The lack of scripting is also a pain as many suppliers will give you a library but often in the form of a script.  so for parts with many pins like a processor, I generate the part in eagle from ththe supplied script, then import it into CS then spend a little time cleaning up.