Chris,
Apologies for taking so long to answer this e-mail, but I got so buried last
week I didn't have much of a chance to check this list.
Regarding Schematic & Layout packages, I don't know much about Proteus.
However, John Woodgate was pretty accurate when he said that for schematic &
layout packages, you either swear by them or swear at them.
For either package, you should call customer support & find what the
support contracts are, both for on-line support & for software patches, and
what their plans are for future upgrades.
A couple years ago, some of the engineers and PCB layout people I work
with expressed concern about the consolidation happening in the schematic &
layout software market. One of the mid-range ($5k-$10k per software seat)
companies had gotten bought up by one of the higher-end companies (>$20k per
seat or something like that) and the higher-end company had immediately
announced they would continue to sell the mid-range product, but there would
be no further releases or major bug fixes planned for it. And I know one
design & manufacturing company that quit using a particular layout package
because the support contract was getting almost as expensive as the software
package itself.
As Robert Macy mentioned, dongles can be a major headache. In the late
90s, they were typically made for use on the parallel port, and they could
interfere with bi-directional communication with a printer connected to that
same parallel port. In recent years, hardware dongles and newer versions of
Windows sometimes don't play well because newer versions of Windows don't let
software access the I/O ports as directly as before, so if some other process
starts using the I/O port or I/O modules, the program looking for the dongle
can't see the dongle and goes into error mode.
Regarding MathCAD software, I haven't used packages like that since I was in
college in the mid-90s. For classes, our professors often asked us to use
MatLab, which I came to view as being like C; it is very powerful, but the
user interface is fairly unintuitive, so it is best to have a tutorial or
how-to book for reference when you do the first few problems.
A friend of mine had a copy of MathCAD, which was much nicer to use for
graphs, equations & presentations, but was not at all suited for recursive
loops or anything like that. Someone told me Maple was somewhere in between
MathCAD & MatLab, but I never had a chance to use it.
I looked at MathCAD recently, and as Jacob Schanker pointed out, it has
become expensive and bloated since the Win 3.11 days.
If you want a graphical interface, MathCAD seems to be the best bet. If
you can get by with a not-so-helpful interface, MatLAB or Octave might be your
best bets. Some of the engineers I work with really like Octave, and it seems
to work pretty well for them.
Hope that helps!
-Camille Good
Portland, Oregon
Chris Maxwell <[email protected]> wrote:
All,
I have recently been looking at schematic capture and layout packages. Two
that are in use around me are Orcad and Proteus.
Orcad schem capture and layout is about $6000, while Proteus schem capture and
layout (without autoroute) are about$1800. Has anybody worked with both
enough to provide a quick comparison? Will one or the other "pigeon hole" me?
I have also been looking into MathCAD or MathCAD-like software. Are there any
other choices other than MathCAD that anyone would recommend?
Thanks,
Chris Maxwell
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