Altium Usage?

[EricVanWyk]

As some of you know, Altium was in the KoP this year and can be found at http://www.altium.com/frc2009/. For those of you who don't, Altium is used to design circuit boards and code for FPGAs. I love it dearly*, and used it to create the PD/DSC/Breakouts/Sensors for this year.

Now I know that many of you were too busy using aforementioned boards, but I am trying to track down teams that took advantage of this tool to create your own custom boards. I'll keep mum on specifics, but suffice it to say that it could be to your advantage to make yourselves known now.

Also, is there a good way to promote its usage (or PCB design in general) in this community?

Thanks
- Eric


* By which I mean that my girlfriend is concerned. I love Altium in ways that may seem unorthodox unless you have felt the searing hate-filled pain that is other EECAD packages.

[Jared Russell]

Eric,

While our team did not make use of the Altium Designer license that came in the kit, I personally have used it briefly as part of a graduate-level EDA course. I echo your praise for the software after several painful years with other electronic design programs.

Regarding Altium and PCB design in FIRST, I think that several factors are challenges to its widespread use:

1. A lack of mentors (and almost no students) experienced in PCB and hardware design.

2. The 6 week design and build timetable makes designing, verifying, and fabricating hardware (and especially PCBs) very difficult.

3. The capabilities of the new FRC control system and the components given to us (thanks Eric!) are more than sufficient for 99% of realistic FRC tasks. If we were still using BASIC Stamps, then I think that more teams would pursue hardware solutions to problems.

4. Even if I have the know-how, time, and motivation, using an FPGA would still be my first choice. In which case the FPGA-specific software (ex. Xilinx Tools, etc.) would probably be used instead.

Hope this helps!

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by Jared341

4. Even if I have the know-how, time, and motivation, using an FPGA would still be my first choice. In which case the FPGA-specific software (ex. Xilinx Tools, etc.) would probably be used instead.

Actually, the Altium software complements the Xilinx tools.

[Dave Flowerday]

I designed and built a custom PCB that we're using 4 of on this year's robot to work around limitations of the control system and to simplify wiring. I did not use Altium, though, as I only had about 3 days to design the schematic and lay out the board, so that seemed like an inopportune time to ramp-up on a new (and probably complex) software package. I've heard great things abut it, though.

Instead, I stuck with the standard suite that I've used for the last several years worth of Wildstang custom circuits and a few other projects. I use KiCad for drawing schematics and FreePCB for board layout. I imagine these tools are primitive compared to Altium, but they're simple and work great for what I use them for. Incidentally, the author of FreePCB is (or was, at least) a FIRST mentor, so that's pretty cool.

I'll try to grab some pictures tonight of some of the boards I've done using this setup.

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.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

I designed and built a custom PCB that we're using 4 of on this year's robot to work around limitations of the control system and to simplify wiring.

What was the application, if you don't mind me asking?

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

What was the application, if you don't mind me asking?

Quadrature encoders. We have an idler wheel mounted right next to each driven wheel as part of our crab module, meaning we have 8 encoders. Those who are doing traction control will tell you that having as high of resolution on the speeds of these wheels as possible is a good thing, meaning we wanted 4x sampling. The new control system isn't capable of 8 4x encoders, and even if it was there were bugs in the encoder implementation that we didn't know if they'd be fixed in time or not (I'm not sure if the issue mentioned by Joe Ross has been fixed even now). Additionally, this meant we only needed 4 wires to each module (power, ground, clock, and data) which we run down through the rotating shaft of our crab modules.

I'll try to grab a picture of one of the modules tonight.

[Daniel_LaFleur]

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.

Eric,

I'd like to second Dave's concerns here.

For most of us, we don't want to train our teammates on something that won't be available to us in the forthcoming years. Autodesk, pretty much, lets us know before the season starts which tools we will have available to FIRST teams for the coming year (Information about the awards starts in September ... I believe). If Altium is known to be available for next year then many of us would start building skillsets with Altium within the team.

[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.