Comment by alnwlsn

Comment by alnwlsn 17 hours ago

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A lot of deserved criticism in the comments here tonight, but more generally, I have to ask - what's the deal with all these code/text to CAD/PCB things?

There's a half dozen of them in any category, they are all different, they all seem to struggle badly with anything outside of simple examples, none of them appear to consider how things fit together in the real world, you almost never see any of them used for anything more complicated than a keyboard layout or an LED matrix, they all have reinvented the wheel instead of using industry standard formats, and they all talk about the "difficulty of using traditional tools" as though placing each XY point in space in your head is easier than dragging things around the screen like in MS Paint. You also never see any serious hardware people use them. Every one wants to do it all from keyboard to finished product instead of being satisfied as a intermediate tool that does one thing well.

But, they all have very polished documentation, they come with examples, they have nice looking websites, and it's obvious someone put a decent amount of thought into making them. It's not like they are useless either. Making a big grid of things? It's nice to be able to write an algorithm to do that instead of entering them by hand.

I brought this up in that post about the LLM to CAD thing the other day. It's like people keep saying "hardware is hard" but then keep trying to solve it like they would work on software problems.

LiamPowell 12 hours ago

At a high level I think a lot of it is simply hubris from software engineers who see the basics of electrical engineering or 3D CAD and think that the basics are all there is to the field. It's the same as when people see a hello world or fizzbuzz program and think that's representative of software engineering before proposing no-code solutions.

Anecdotally as someone who studied mechatronics: Software engineers are far worse than any other engineering field in assuming that everything is trivial compared to SE.

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vbezhenar 13 hours ago

When I'm using Fusion 360, I can't stop thinking that this whole experience would be much better with code. It has awesome underlying engine, but GUI UX is just terrible. I'd prefer to describe objects in code, observing code output in real-time on adjacent panel, using proper text editor to apply changes.

I've used OpenSCAD, it's not the thing I want, it doesn't have constraint solving, the key is using constraint solving with feedback to highlight warnings, etc.

Now maybe I'm not talking about complete replacement of GUI with code, but rather an alternative view, where you can either use GUI to model objects, or switch to code where everything is synchronized.

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buescher 16 hours ago

They're aiming to recapitulate the success of HDL design in the IC world. The jitx folks are pretty clear about that. There are a lot of problems with that that could be a medium-sized think piece, but some things folks are doing in the space are neat. PCB-level EDA is overdue for better design checks, for example.

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  • crote 44 minutes ago

    > PCB-level EDA is overdue for better design checks, for example.

    The software itself is perfectly capable - the problem is in the source data. The industry-standard data format is "datasheet PDF written by intern".

    If you want better design checks you need someone to manually read and interpret a whole bunch of nonstandard and confusing datasheets, and enter it into your EDA software. And no, LLMs won't save you here: the tiniest detail is critical, and due to the habit of using one datasheet for a whole family of chips they are often self-contradictory to a casual reader.

    Alternatively, get hundreds of competing manufacturers to agree on a single data exchange format, and get them to rewrite their documentation for a few decades worth of parts into that format - for free, with zero additional sales.

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snops 10 hours ago

I think the most recent surge is due to LLMs, the only way to (easily) apply them is to have some form of code like textual representation of your problem domain so "circuits as code" is the obvious way to wedge them into electronic engineering.

Kicad also makes it easier to make such startups as it has an open file format with several different free viewer tools and lots of content (schematics/footprints). If that ecosystem didn't exist I don't think you would see as many of these startups around, but with that you can launch one of these tools within a initial VC funding

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ginko 10 hours ago

I can only talk about my own experience trying to learn FreeCAD for a project[1] I eventually used Build123d for.

For me FreeCAD was highly unintuitive. Everything is a chain of operations/modifications on solids(good!) but for some reason it won't let you modify anything but the last element in the chain?

I was working on a trackball device so part of the parameters are the size of the trackball you'd use.. This affects pretty much all the parts in the chain but you have to decide all the way in the beginning on what size you need. In code-based systems this is simply a variable you define in the beginning and can modify at any point. Let's say I want to use M2 screws instead of M3 ones or use a larger bearing: I can just change a variable at the start of the script.

Being an absolute beginner I also had to reorganize stuff a couple of times. With python/build123d that's a matter of shuffling around code in your editor. I don't even know how you would do that in FreeCAD without deleting and redoing large swathes of your design.

Then there's my general unease dealing with this opaque representation of your model where any previous step you may have took puts your project into some state that can't really be undone or at least not intuitively found. When working with code and something breaks you can usually recover from a broken state by stripping out whatever you were working on. At worst you can just go back to your last revision in Git. With GUI-based tools you have to pray that Undo/Redo gets you to a state you wanted without losing too much.

Maybe the proprietary tools work better here but they don't run on Linux and I also don't use them for ethical reasons.

Admittedly the whole experience with build123d is anything but perfect. I _would_ like to just pick stuff with the mouse where possible and have a nice real-time display of changes I make. Ideally I'd like to see some sort of editing graph where you can see intermediate steps and pick visually parts to operate on for the next step - all underpinned by a concise textual representation that can be versioned.

Maybe this is me showing SE hubris but it's how I was able to get a reasonably complex personal project done. Maybe programming somehow broke my brain, IDK.

[1] https://github.com/ginkgo/trackball/

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  • crote an hour ago

    > For me FreeCAD was highly unintuitive. Everything is a chain of operations/modifications on solids(good!) but for some reason it won't let you modify anything but the last element in the chain?

    This has been a longstanding issue in FreeCAD. A big issue is that it is really difficult algorithm-wise to deal with changing geography: a tiny change might result in two objects which look the same, but have a completely different internal representation. If the next operation is attached to "face #23", it's going to freak out. This is called the "topological naming problem"[0], and it is pretty much impossible to solve completely.

    FreeCAD itself can support the kind of parametric modeling you want, but because it's so fragile the UX is pretty horrible. To do it properly you essentially have to specifically design your entire model around being parametric from the start.

    Luckily FreeCAD made some massive improvements in 1.0, and issues due to topological naming are now far less likely to occur. Hopefully it'll eventually turn from "guaranteed to ruin your day every time you try altering something" to "might need some manual adjustment in weird edge cases" - and that would also make it far more sensible to invest in UX for making mid-change modifications, or for modeling using variables.

    [0]: https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem

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  • LiamPowell 6 hours ago

    The only thing FreeCAD has going for it is that it's free, everything else about it is far behind the serious commercial tools.

    > Ideally I'd like to see some sort of editing graph where you can see intermediate steps and pick visually parts to operate on for the next step - all underpinned by a concise textual representation that can be versioned.

    This is exactly how most[1] commercial 3D CAD packages have worked for at least the last 30 years, they've done it longer than Git or SVN have existed. Specifically everything is represented as a list of operations (sketches, extrusions, chamfers, etc.) and you can freely go back and edit any step, or you can click on any part of a model and see exactly what step was used to generate it.

    Some CAD packages will let you see a textual representation, but it's only really useful for scripting when they do. The versioning tools that are built in to any CAD package are far better than trying to work with text.

    [1]: Excluding the more obscure CAD packages like Creo that do things differently to fit in to a specific niche.

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    • LiamPowell 5 hours ago

      As an example of this:

      Here's a hinge mechanism: https://files.catbox.moe/06g9cg.png

      Here's the very first sketch in the timeline, I've just clicked on this to edit it, there was no undoing required: https://files.catbox.moe/xzr3un.png

      Here it is overlaid on the model, which just requires a single mouse click to toggle: https://files.catbox.moe/339fvg.png

      Here it is after I changed a bunch of numbers: https://files.catbox.moe/pvykrx.png

      Here's what it looks like when I press the button to show the final model again: https://files.catbox.moe/6bjc0c.png

      Just like that the entire model has changed based on the initial sketch. I didn't have to go edit any other features here.

      As a bonus here's the assembly being moved by dragging the mouse after those changes, showing that this might not be the most well-designed hinge after those changes: https://files.catbox.moe/eztkja.mp4

      Also here's the timeline I mentioned, you can see how I've clicked on a feature and it shows me exactly what it did, this also works when clicking on part of the model: https://files.catbox.moe/f0bb2k.png

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    • ginko 5 hours ago

      Well, like I said: From open tools I had available b123d was the one that relatively quickly (within a weekend from picking up the tool) allowed me to mock up something to the point where I became confident enough to keep going.

      I tried to do that with FreeCAD without too much success. I assume someone proficient with it could probably crank out the whole thing within an afternoon, but not me.

      I'm sure professional tools are many times more productive, but you need to spend thousands of dollars and presumably months if not years of training to become proficient in them.

      And admittedly that's more of a weird hangup of mine but to me it also sort-of misses the point to use a proprietary tool for building an open source project. No one without the tool could open the source files and make modifications.

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