Dip Trace schematic and PCB layout software

[Westcliffe01]

Since I spent the past few days getting my laptop to dual boot with Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 Linux and then downloading a ton of scientific software for free for Linux, one of the items I was looking for was software for PCB design.

The ones I found for Linux were:
electric (schematic including house wiring)
gEDA (comprehensive schematic and PCB layout toolkit)
GerbV (viewer for Gerber files)
KiCad (comprehensive schematic and PCB layout toolkit)

For Windows, there were many limited capability tools (Lite editions of very expensive tools) but in addition I found DipTrace http://www.diptrace.com/
What is unique about DipTrace is that they are taking on the giants (Orcad etc) at a fraction of the price.  What may be specially interesting to people on this board are 2 products:
DipTrace Starter $75 (300 pins, 2 layers) and
DipTrace Non Profit $125 (1000 pins, 4 layers non profit use only)

In addition, if you read the testimonial section, there are very good reports on customer service.  http://www.diptrace.com/testimonials.php

[BruceM]

Thanks for the Linux PCB software tips, WestCliffe, that's very helpful. One of these days I'm going to abandon Windows.  It's a sorry state of affairs when Unix derived open source bloatware  is more efficient and stable than Windows. When I have more time I'll go to a dual boot setup, and only use "dos when I must run engineering software not available for Linux.

I've been using ExpressPCB.com 's free schematic and pcb layout software the last 3 years. The software is very easy to use, but does things like copper fill (for ground plane) and exclude areas very nicely. Their price on the fixed size, 2 layer "experimenter's miniboard" is very good; $60 w/2 day delivery included for 3 boards. Usually just one day to make them.  Custom board sizes are also competative.  The only downside is that the software doesn't make Gerber files; you can't take the output anywhere else.  But given their prices, I don't care. I'm not doing production work where volume boards from China will be involved.

Best Wishes,
Bruce M

[Westcliffe01]

Bruce, if you have a windows PC, it is actually very easy to go to a dual boot linux configuration.  It only took me that long because my laptop was purchased directly from Dell with Ubuntu 9.04 and no ways will windows go onto that machine until every trace of linux has been exorcised.   To make things worse, the laptop (model 1545) was never sold in the US with XP, only Vista.  After my last experience with Vista I was determined there would be NO WAY I would be doing that again.  So the result is that Dell USA was not offering any support for XP on the laptop.  I discovered that the same laptop was sold in other places around the world with XP and some folks started collecting drivers for all of the peripherals and posting them online.  Anyway, doing it the way I did was a pain in the you know what, but any other way I would have been stuck with Vista or Windows 7.

I have in fact been perfectly satisfied with my laptop running Ubuntu 9.04, but couldn't get the Freescale development system to to run under wine (a sort of windows emulator in Linux).  Perhaps if I had taken enough time I might have figured it out.  But going from a working windows setup to dual boot with Linux is only a 15 minute job, followed by some updates afterward.   Since I had a "clean slate" I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, and besides preferring the splash screen with the older version, it works great and provides for safe browsing and tons of free software.   

Maybe 5 years ago the only thing you could do with linux was professional software development and internet hosting, but the gap is closing all the time and for scientific work I would say that you need a ton of money to have equivalent capability as what you can get in Linux for free.

[AdeV]

With the power of modern computers, you don't even need to bother with dual-booting these days: Just use Windows as your "primary" OS, and VMWare to run a virtual machine running the second OS of your choice. A crafty combination of tools will allow you to build VMWare images for $0:

Use VMX Builder to create & configure your virtual machines: http://www.vmxbuilder.com/vmx-builder/index.html

Use VMWare Player 2.5 to "play" them (also free for non-commercial use): http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

Both products run under Windows, not sure about native Linux support.

The beauty of a VM is you can clone it & try something out; if it trashes the machine, just wipe it & return to the clone.

[Westcliffe01]

Ade: Surely what you suggest is heresy....

You suggest running an emulation of a different system, like Linux, under windows !!!!

What I was after was a system completely without windows and I was basically there, except that wasn't able to get the Freescale development system to run under wine.   Now that option, (emulating windows under a stable OS !) has far more appeal to me than the other way around.

With a bit of luck, if I can get some of the earlier Freescale code to run natively under Linux, it will allow me to delete windows again.

best of luck
Keith

[mobile_bob]

i am still pissed that i can't get warp4 to run on my laptop!



bob g

[AdeV]

Ade: Surely what you suggest is heresy....

You suggest running an emulation of a different system, like Linux, under windows !!!!

It's not really an emulation, in the true sense of the word, since both execute natively on x86 hardware. VMWare is more of a wrapper which looks, to whatever is inside of it, as if it's a standalone computer.

What I was after was a system completely without windows and I was basically there, except that wasn't able to get the Freescale development system to run under wine.   Now that option, (emulating windows under a stable OS !) has far more appeal to me than the other way around.

That should be possible: create a Windows VM machine; then run that under Linux to make your software play friendly... I don't know what Linux tools are out there; maybe VMX builder will play under WINE? I guess you'd need a "proper" Linux VMWare player, the performance hit trying to run the Windows version under Wine would, I think, be too much - even if it did play ball.

With a bit of luck, if I can get some of the earlier Freescale code to run natively under Linux, it will allow me to delete windows again.

I'm not quite at that stage yet; but, luckily, I had an MSDN Universal subscription until about 2003, which means I have a bunch of XP and 2003 server licences, as well as .Net development tools & so on. So I'm a few years from ditching Windows yet...

[Westcliffe01]

Ade, I guess after so many years of using windows, microsoft and every other software developer out there seems to be faster at ways of keeping unauthorized access open, than users can close them.

I spent most of 1 day removing windows update, messenger and a host of other services which all open ports of communication which can be exploited by hackers.  I'm sure I don't have half of the gaps closed yet.

On our windows desktop, we recently had a virus / trojan issue and despite installing Norton Anti Virus 2010 (which did remove the virus) that machine has slowed to a crawl ever since.  The overhead of downloading all the updates needed by the anti virus software has a real impact on using the internet and CPU activity from scanning files and websites.

Since I have Ubuntu I have no anti virus code and my machine is lightning fast and never seems hung up downloading something I wasn't aware of or doing any scanning in the background.  And I get no annoying popups, either of the malicious type or from the OS.   Using adblock and Noscript on Mozilla has transformed the internet experience, since I can permanently block all the dancing ladies, banners and all the other advertising hogwash which sucks up bandwidth and restricting access to the stuff of meaning on most websites that I frequent.  Yahoo mail is completely transformed when you block yahoo.com and allow only yimg.com.   Clean, lightning fast text only (unless there are embedded images in your mail) and full screen width.   Just like it used to be before they invented all the advertising gibberish....

[BruceM]

Yes, it's an endless circle- Microsoft creates the train sized loopholes, then you must have your computer constantly monitoring for security updates the their stuff and your antivirus software.

My ex-girlfriend's little Asus netbook running Linux is WAY faster for email and web browsing than my XP Dell tower with 4x the processor and twice the ram.  She has the solid state drive.  After a year, she's never gotten a virus. 

I agree about running a VM under Windows- the whole point would be not not have Windows running most of the time.  Windows running in a VM under Ubuntu sounds more interesting. 

[wrightkiller]

    look at this one ...........50 mb    cd or flash bootable or on your hard drive ......even if no hard drive present    
 
   
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/index.html

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html

[mkdutchman]

I use Ubuntu on a daily basis, I've found WINE works quite well for the windows applications that I haven't been able to completely ditch, I switched over completely to ubuntu/linux in January of this year. I like it!! My PC runs like lightning, no stinkin' virus problems, (or the related AV resource hogging) no more windows bloatware..........I've found the freely available software under linux tends to be more powerful and more flexible, at the cost of being slightly more technical..........

Any PCB needs, (and I don't have a lot of that) are more than adequately met with kicad, once I got over the learning curve......