Altium Usage?

[EricVanWyk]

I'm hearing a bit of "Great!!... but not right for me...". How can I make it right for you?

Part of the reason I am so pushy on this front is that I would have killed for this in high school. I did a single board layout in 10th grade, which was fantastic for my education (look at me now, ma!). However, it was with dated tools that were not intuitive, so we could only do a very very simple board. With a better tool kit, I could have had even more fun. I was blessed with a set of rather decent tech teachers, and I realize not everyone is as lucky as I was there. Mentoring in college really humbled me, because it made me realize just how lucky I was. Now I'm getting a bit manic trying to return the favor luck paid me. Please help me do so.

What do we need to provide to help students take advantage of this opportunity? Do we need to provide ... more tutorials? community support? board house support? professional EEs to review/advise on boards?

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Sadly, I just now reconfirmed one of the reasons I didn't attempt to use Altium: we're only given a temporary license that expires next January. I'd hate to put in a bunch of work laying out a board and then not be able to access it after that point. And, it's way too expensive to consider buying a permanent license for myself, so using it now and getting hooked would likely just be a disappointment later on when I don't have access to it anymore.

I didn't realize that this was an issue. I was under the impression that the 1 year Altium license is the same as all of our other 1 year licenses - You get a 1 year license each year. If you like, I can confirm this with the Altium rep and ask her to publicly clarify the point.

[EricVanWyk]

I apologize for the double post, but a thought came to me last night:

Currently, the rules dictate that the official analog breakout must be connected to slot 1 with the jumper selecting the battery voltage for AI8.

What if the rules were revised to say something closer to "Channel 8 of slot 1 must be wired with a resistor divider with values X and Y to the input battery voltage. An easy way to do this is with the official analog breakout with the jumper as such." ? I don't see any other rules nor safety guidelines preventing the use of custom analog breakouts, and it could be an easy place to get your toes wet. I'd love to see a team make an "analog breakout" that is a 6 axis IMU + compass + battery monitor.

[Alex698]

Why not just use the second analog input module?

[IceStorm]

I would love to check out the altium program but have tried on at least 3 different attempts now to sign up for the download link and have not heard back from them on where to get the download from.

[oddjob]

I'm a mentor and use Altium a lot for schematics and pcb layout. The team didn't build any custom boards this year, so it wasn't used by the team. For documentation, a FIRST Altium library of electrical and electromechanical components (cRIO, sidecars, CIM, etc.) could be used to draw a complete robot schematic. That would be great to have.

Also, as someone else mentioned above, my online application for a license went into a black hole and never got a reply.

[EricVanWyk]

Could those of you whose requests disappeared please PM me?

[Rich Kressly]

Eric,

IMHO while high-end tools like this are very cool, they will always be utilized by a very low percentage of teams - especially if it's something that comes to us "at kickoff" in a year where it's draining time and human resources just to get a new control system up and running consistently. In subsequent years, you'll see an increase I'm sure - if teams feel comfortable that the tool will be around for multiple years and if rules and games continue to call for use of an application. Even with that said, though, a tool that designs custom circuits will not be something that the overwhelming majority of our 2000+ teams ever utilizes due to time and human resource considerations unless it's something that "has" to be used.

[ay2b]

I did not use Altium -- I didn't realize it was available, and wouldn't have had time to learn it even if I did. It sounds like potentially a very useful package though. If you'd like to get more teams using it, here's what I'd recommend (off the top of my head, and in no particular order):

• give teams the software early (say in April or May)
• give teams an incentive to learn it
  • free fabrication of boards (up to a certain size/quantity?)
  • a commitment that the product will be part of the KoP for at least X years
  • perhaps allow for parts designed/fabricated before kickoff but using the current software & free fab lab to be permitted on the robot
• give teams tutorials & instructions

[ehochstein]

If it counts for anything, my team downloaded it and looked at it. We never ended up using it though.