Diptrace Review
Diptrace is an ECA/CAD software to build schematic design and the printed circuit board. You can quickly create any schematics and then change it to the other formats, i.e., PCB.
We hope you like subscription fees. Autodesk that EAGLE is now only available for purchase as a subscription. Previous, users purchased EAGLE once, and used the software indefinitely (often for years) before deciding to move to a new version with another one-time purchase. Now, they’ll be paying Autodesk on a monthly or yearly basis. Lets break down the costs. From CadSoft, a Standard license would run you $69, paid once.
The next level up was Premium, at $820, paid once. The new pricing tiers from Autodesk are a bit different. Standard will cost $15/month or $100/year, and gives similar functionality to the old Premium level, but with only 2 signal layers. If you need more layers, or more than 160 cm^2 of board space, you’ll need the new Premium level, at $65/month or $500/year. New Pricing Table for EAGLE This is a bad deal for the pocket book of many users.
- My diptrace libraries. Contribute to mukymuk/diptrace development by creating an account on GitHub. Skip to content. GitHub is home to over 28 million developers working together to host and review code, manage projects, and build software together.
- DipTrace engineering department offers Schematic Capture, PCB Layout and Library Creation services. All projects are done by experienced electronic engineer and expert user of DipTrace Schematic and PCB Design software. Our staff will work with you till the project is done without overcharging.
If you could have made do with the old Standard option, you’re now paying $100/year instead of the one-time $69 payment. If you need more space or layers, you’ll likely be up to $500/year. Autodesk also killed the lower cost options for non-commercial use, what used to be a $169 version that was positioned for hobbyists. The free version still exists, but for anyone using Eagle for commercial purposes (from Tindie sellers to engineering firms) this is a big change. Even if you agree with the new pricing, a subscription model means you never actually own the software. This model will require licensing software that needs to phone home periodically and can be killed remotely.
If you need to look back at a design a few years from now, you better hope that your subscription is valid, that Autodesk is still running the license server, and that you have an active internet connection. On the flip side of the coin, we can assume that Eagle was sold partly because the existing pricing model wasn’t doing all it should. Autodesk is justifying these changes with a promise of more frequent updates and features which will be included in all subscriptions.
But sadly, Autodesk couldn’t admit that the new pricing has downsides for users: “We know it’s not easy paying a lump sum for software updates every few years. It can be hard on your budget, and you never know when you need to have funds ready for the next upgrade.” In their press release, they claim the move is only good for customers.
Their marketing speak even makes the cliche comparison to the price of a coffee every day. Garrett Mace summarized his view on this nicely on: “previously paid $1591.21 for 88 months $18.08/mo. Moving to $65/mo? KICAD looks better.” We agree Garrett. Has been improving steadily in the past years, and now is definitely a good time for EAGLE users to consider it before signing on to the Autodesk Subscription Plan ™. Posted in Tagged, Post navigation.
Took about a year for me to finally get around to it, but I FINALLY learned how to use KiCAD! Best of all, I got paid to learn it and design a tester for my employer! It’s a rather simple device, but it proved to be a great starting point to learn with!
I even learned how to create a custom footprint for a part I needed to use. I’m quite happy with the results. What really stands out for me, is I wanted to learn Eagle, or any free PC board tool for a solid decade and a half, maybe more. I have wanted to mark this check on my skill list, but kept passing it off to “some other time”.
I had a copy of Eagle before they had a Mac version. I eventually downloaded KiCAD as well But both tools sat for years.
Any time I thought about it, I just let myself be intimidated by everything there was to learn, and I went back to etching hand routed or toner transferred patterns, or to wire wrap. I already know what my first personal board design will be. I’m working on a Kerbal Space Program instrument/control panel. One of my instruments is an FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator) aka, the navball. It requires a reference 120 volt, 400 Hz sine wave (doubles as power), and 9 total (three triplets) of 28 volt 400 Hz inputs that are basically attenuated from the reference.
Their phase can flip 180° as well. This is basically, the signals that would normally come from a synchro transformer on a gyro. I’m trying to reproduce them electronically. To do this, I will generate a 400 Hz sine wave, and feed it through an inverting and a non inverting op-amp to get the normal and flipped signal. That feeds into a set of analog switch chips (to select the inverted or non-inverted signal), and that then feeds to an attenuating DAC.
Since I need three axes, I’ll design the board with one axis, enough configuration to set each board to it’s function, and then take advantage of the fact that companies like OSH Park basically give you three identical copies of the board you order. Doing it that way, means I’ll get three boards One for each axis. I’ll only populate the 400 Hz sine gen and the two op-amps on one board, and wire that to all three.
Best use of my bucks! Garbz obviously know that he is spewing bullshit.
I sense DipTrace marketing guy at work. If you do something more complex than what CERN do, maybe KiCAD isn’t for you, but then again you would probably go with Cadence, Mentor or possibly Altiums offerings rather than an obscure CAD package 1. KiCAD is an adequate replacement for Eagle feature-wise. Eagles strength isn’t the the powerful features anyway, it is the libraries and open source projects. If we as a community is going to rebuild this library it doesn’t make sense to do it in a proprietary product that will end up getting bought by a big CAD/EDA house that only want to capitalize on the time that the open source community has invested.
I sort of agree here. For the record I have been using it in a professional environment. I was using the previous version just because there was nothing else free that did boards bigger than credit cards (company was still in start-up status so expensive software for a few boards was not a welcomed option). It had a lot of issues. Nightly builds solved some issues and introduced others. Current version is still missing major features but what it does it now does well.
It’s readyy to overtake the likes of Eagle and gaining traction on “professional” tools. End of the day all you need is to input schematics and design boards. Any software should be able to accomplish that. All the excess that “professional” tools offer is fluff.
Including KiCAD. More fluff is helpful but not NECESSARY. Thus far kicad has focused on the most useful key features fluff. It’s a very solid direction. I’ve been using DipTrace commercially for quite some time (the lowest licence, though). Be careful – it counts vias as pads! I was truly pissed off, when I got stuck suddenly with my PCB just when I tried to add another via:) And my overall feelings about DipTrace are average – counter-intuitive at times, no significant updates for the last few years, etc.
There’s a lot to be done. To be frank, I wish there was a better choice in the low-end market.
Unfortunately KiCAD’s UI a show-stopper for me. Software developers should not design UIs. And Eagle is no better (disclaimer: I used OrCAD and Protel a lot in the past, so I might be biased). About a year and a half ago I decided it was time to leave Eagle. Their licensing model for commercial was just not realistic.
If you want to do small 2 layer boards the lowest paid version was too bad. If you wanted to do just a little bit bigger board, it was a big jump in price. The board sized got a relatively small increase. The big upgrade is that your schematic didn’t have to be on a single sheet. You now got 99 sheets. Big deal, as if you would ever need that many schematic for such a small board.
The final straw was when I needed to do a 12” X 12” single sided board with maybe 15 components. I would have to upgrade to the $1200 package. I started looking at DipTrace and KiCAD. I liked DipTrace better, but could have lived with KiCAD. I went with DipTrace. I find DipTrace one of the easiest PCB CAD programs I have used, which numbers around 8 or 10.
Commercial use of DipTrace is not free, but it is not outrageous. The different versions are limited by component pin count which I like. I don’t have to pay a lot extra to make a larger board with just a few components. If you pay yearly it’s $41.67 per month as opposed to the $65 in my quote above, but still an increase from the rate I was paying before. However, my main concern is not with the pricing (though irritating), my concern is with the dependency on an internet connection and Autodesk continuing to run servers for it.
I’ve seen too many products come and go to trust my tools to this paradigm. I have downloaded the latest version that works with my license (Eagle 7.7) for all three operating systems and am keeping it in a safe place. And starting learning KiCAD today, successfully creating PCB for the first time due to the added motivation. If you ever upgrade to Eagle 8.0, you cannot legally let your subscription lapse and go back to your previously purchased Eagle 7.7.0 license: “1.2.1 Effect of Upgrades.
If Autodesk or a Reseller provides Licensee with an Upgrade to other Licensed Materials previously licensed to Licensee, the Licensed Materials previously licensed to Licensee and any other Autodesk Materials relating thereto will thereafter be deemed to be a “Previous Version.” Except as set forth in Section 1.2.2 (Exception for Relationship Program Licensees), the license grant and other rights with respect to any Previous Version will terminate one hundred twenty (120) days after Installation of the Upgrade. Within such one hundred twenty (120) day period, except as set forth in Section 1.2.2 (Exception for Relationship Program Licensees), (a) Licensee must cease all use of any Previous Version and Uninstall all copies of the Previous Version, and (b) upon expiration of such period, such Previous Version will no longer constitute Licensed Materials but rather will be deemed to be Excluded Materials and Licensee will no longer have a license for any such Previous Version. At Autodesk’s request, Licensee agrees to destroy or return to Autodesk or the Reseller from which they were acquired all copies of the Previous Version. Autodesk reserves the right to require Licensee to show satisfactory proof that all copies of any Previous Version have been Uninstalled and, if so requested by Autodesk, destroyed or returned to Autodesk or the Reseller from which they were acquired.”. This clause of the contract.really. makes me wary of upgrading my Eagle Pro license.
I often straddle between old & new versions of apps for a long time. Sometimes the new versions leave out needed features, have new crippling bugs, or break existing needed workflow. I can’t throw out old versions on a whim. Previously, you could either opt to upgrade a previous version of Eagle or buy a whole new versions. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do this with Eagle 8.
No thanks, Autodesk. Fix your licensing or your pricing and I’ll consider buying a new license. This is completely inaccurate but I appreciate you bringing it up, so we can tease out just what this means. When you purchased a previous license, you did so under a Cadsoft license agreement.
We have no authority or interest in doing anything to that license as it was a different legal framework by which you made that agreement. Under subscription, there is no “major” release and thus that clause would never apply i.e. Version 8.0 of EAGLE is only a version number for convenienceas we move forward, this is just EAGLE and there is no major “Upgrade” like there was in the past, thus nothing to force anyone to stop using an older license. It can be confusing, so I understand why you’d point it out, but it’s not an accurate assessment of what that entails. What’s more, it’s not in our interest to stop you from using your previous Cadsoft product. This would apply to a scenario in which the users were trying to get two licenses, effectively for the price of one, by installing a new version and then utilizing the old license for “second seat”. I somehow survived without MS Office and Adobe products, but then, I am no professional.
For my use gimp and libreoffice were enough. Solidworks – agree on that, at least haven’t seen proper replacement. Eagle was good enough for my use (and I am mostly programmer, occasionally doing some electronics, not the reverse). KiCAD – it was built by martians for martians. (Starting from the add component to schematic interface).
I am counting the “how many times do I have to click/type to do anything”. Guys, this is a good stratigic move for Autodesk.
We all hate subscriptions but Autodesk had most of the elements needed to offer a ‘maker suite’ or an integrated ‘EDI’ product except for the PCB design area. Now they have a decent offering. Just like Fusion 360 is not a direct threat to Solidworks but is getting there, Eagle is a looooong way off from competing against Altium or Orcad but if they put the same effort into Eagle as they did to Solidworks (and the fix the totally non-intuitive UI), I will come back to Eagle. Yeah, I’d be buying enough coffee daily to float the Titanic if all the “Only one coffee a day” people added their “highly affordable” fees/products/subscription scams together.
Probably take their ideas about household economics from those big newspaper financial pages “30 ways you’re wasting money” fluff articles, that if you add up all the claims, mean everyone of age in North America “really” has a 500,000 a year income that they didn’t know about that they’re only managing to get 40,000 or so benefit out of. Stuff like “Fly commercial instead of renting a business jet, Buy your next Ferrari used,. Listen up pocket pickers, the total amount of coffee I drink in a day totals about 50 cents. Then they want to direct debit it or charge your card monthly, and one month comes and they “accidentally” bill you 10 times, or with a decimal in the wrong place, and nobody is responsible, it was the computer, and unless you’re willing to spend HOURS of your life on the phone they’ll hope you let it go at that no fuck you, somewhere you’re employing a miserable excuse for an employee who screwed up royally, either that or a psychopathic manager or exec who introduces deliberate mistakes to improve the bottom line, knowing few people can be assed to chase them. So nobody gets to direct debit or monthly charge me automatically any more. And the latest dodge, employ a 3rd party payment processor to make mistakes on your behalf and charge the customer for the privilege, triple hell no with a barrel of AIDs infected used needles on top, because apparently getting through to just one company’s only understandably English speaking Indian call center customer service employee is too easy any more. Yeah, I think I’d rather lather myself in BBQ sauce and jump in a tank of piranhas than expose myself to TWELVE times the risk of screw up yearly.
And I’ve come to these conclusions dealing with only a small handful of companies, can you even imagine when you’ve got every penny ante, 2 bit operation demanding to do business like this, dozens of them, you’d literally be spending the rest of your life on hold to one or another waiting to demand to know why too much money “accidentally” disappeared from your account. I tried kicad some years ago when it was not stable. I gave it another try 2 weeks ago and it crashed when i tried to paint a dimension outline and assign fixed positions to that line later.
I tried it several times and it crashed every single time. Than i tried it again without any components in the design and that worked. The kind of problem that is hard to report and hard to look up for a solution. I tought to myself: “well kicad.
I will give you another shot in a year or so.”. But now i HAVE to switch. I am sure kiCAD and I will get along over time. Good bye eagle. You were my first EDA, i spent enough time with you.
Thanks for everything, time to let go. It’s interesting how people will give plenty of money to corporations making proprietary software (that also spies on you and threatens to disable parts of your system or even the whole thing), but the same people expect Free Software projects to deliver the goods for precisely nothing in return.
And even worse, to do so for those closed systems. They should at least have the decency of sharing some of that cash they’re throwing around if they can’t be bothered to embrace sustainable computing choices and want others to pander to their own questionable choices instead. Where is this “resources section”?
As of the removal of it’s not on the Eagle product page. The required materials have been hidden away on an obscure FTP site, and you’re suggesting that users hunt and peck through forum posts to find the installation files. The release notes are not with the executables — I have still not found them, although I did finally find the installers. Don’t you see how these changes alienate your customers? Combined with tone of superiority (“this has been there since day one” — really?) and unpalatable license changes with zero notice Anyways, if you can point me to the latest V7 release notes that’d be great.
I did find that recent KiCad versions could load.brd files, at least, and this did work for one thing I wanted to look at. Of course, not being familiar with Eagle, I don’t have any expectations about what the result should be, but having searched for converters myself, it didn’t occur to me to try the obvious thing: just see if one of the KiCad applications can open the file. Just looking at this now, the trick is to run pcbnew separately, use the “File - Open” option to locate and load the.brd file, save the board, then open the.pro file that also gets created somehow with KiCad. Creating a project in KiCad first and then opening the PCB editor (pcbnew) won’t work because the “Open” option is removed unless there’s a.kicadpcb file already. I appreciate that the Eagle and KiCad data is multifaceted (or whatever the term is) and thus a board layout might look great but actually be missing schematic or footprint details.
The.brd file must be only one part of a number of other files Eagle uses (I wouldn’t know), so there would need to be a way of getting the component and netlist data out into a form usable by the schematic editor if you had nothing else. For my quick inspection of an actual board design, however, this wasn’t a priority for me. I hope this didn’t tell you things you already knew. I saw this news for this pop up in my inbox this morning, and was angry all day over it. “The Eagle has landed.” blah blah blah. Right in a pile of crap. I’ve been considering going to Kicad for about a year now, so I guess this is what I’m going to do.
I’ll bet the Kicad folks are jumping for joy over this – Autodesk just killed off Eagle pretty much. On a side note to Autodesk.
Diptrace Review
Make it $9.99 a month for the full version ($120 per year) and watch the cash flood in. $65 per month? Stick a fork in you. Thanks to Brian Benchoff’s series, and the uncertainty around the Eagle acquisition, I decided to use KiCad for my current project.
Diptrace Software Review
It turns out, I really like KiCad, especially the push and shove routing and the separation of schematic library and PCB footprints. I thought I would probably go back to eagle, just because I have a large library of customized parts in eagle, but it looks like I’ll be looking to convert the Eagle libraries to KiCad. Just wish I could get back the $69 dollars I paid for Eagle last year. You seem to be conflating “free version” and “pirated version”. I’ll chalk that down to bitterness towards the 1.49 million “freetards” (what are you, 12?) who decided the app wasn’t worth spending money on and probably regretted spending even time and bandwidth on it.
Fact: if you offer a free version of software, you’d best make sure that (1) it’s worth using as-is, and (2) there are many good incentives to convince people to upgrade to the paid version. EAGLE passed the first hurdle but failed the second, and now their new owners are looking at income forecasts and are unable to resist the siren song of replacing one-off purchases with a continuous revenue stream. Yes, maybe that was not a good term to use. The abuse thrown at game developers is at epidemic levels. It’s why most dev house never answer emails, they just send the to a big empty hole. One game I worked on uses a server to validate in app purchases.
Majority of the traffic is fake store certificates. IOS and Android. The pay for model on mobile is dead.
Every man, woman, child and their dogs thinks it’s ok to steal, and because of this a new module was needed. And now you have it, a subscription model. You reap what you sow. (and everyone else suffers).
It’s more likely about a corporation looking to squeeze more out of it’s users by moving the the MRR model rather than a one off payment. You might have noticed an awful lot of Cloud / IoT (buzzword) products use this model. It’s a smaller pill to swallow up front and it’s human nature to forget about the cost. Or for a business it’s sometimes easier to budget these monthly expenditures than the internal bun fight to get a “one off” PO signed off every 12 months or so when you need the upgrade.
Currently working for a large corporate that is moving all it’s software to the MRR model for the next releases. The exercise is entirely being run by the finance side of the business looking for a regular revenue to be able to rely on for the share price. Well, this way you can only generate a portion of code strictly related to parsing XML described by DTD, however, the published DTD is not entirely complete plus some conversions like mirroring and rotation are not described by DTD at all as they made on top of it. Range checking is also not in DTD as a valid piece of code. Finally, I really doubt that both coding style and naming conventions and intent for further developments would be respected by automatic code generator. At the present time this library implements only a small set of planned features, so significant part of its code is about interfacing with XML, but at least it works well for I/O. If you agree to their software license, all of your data is usable by Autodesk in some fashion.
It doesn’t allow them to say, copy your design and distribute it, but it does allow them to upload your data in the background to their servers, and for them, or certain third parties, to “audit” it. Which means that they’ll be monetizing your design in some fashion, at least in my reading of the terms. This may be the biggest reason to walk away from Eagle. This is really egregious. Privacy; Use of Information; Connectivity 4.1 Privacy and Use of Information. Well, this kinda sucks.
Diptrace 2.0 Download
I use Inventor and Eagle, as well as autocad, and all are now ‘transitioned’. I, unfortunately, don’t have a choice, but the autocad license isn’t out of my pocket. The other two are, but are tied to work, as well (different venue). I would like to move away, but the industry penetration (carefully chosen word) is too deep (again) to get away from it. I like the support provided by autodesk. I like Inventor and tolerate autocad, but I miss Unix suport (where Autocad started), and preferred cadkey back in the day.
I also have several installs of each, based on the license and use. It is a real pain. I have the educational install for the teaching gig, paid install at one level for another, and different paid install for a third. If I use the wrong one, I am liable. I would love to just use the education install (the most featurefull) for everything, but, no, I have to do things the hard way sometimes. Over the years, I have rewritten many features of the more expensive versions in autolisp.
I guess now I need to add eagle to the list of which-install-am-I-using. With this, comes a reminder that the ‘hacking community’, and the unprofessional inquisitive amateur is generally still viewed as being messing with things that they should not. So it was, and so it will ever be. For better and for worse. It should not come as any surprise to anyone that once Autodesk aquired Eagle, that sooner or later, a more professional pricing model would come around, from this there will be an increase in development, improvements, a better tool. It just isn’t any longer a tool the tiniest of joes can get hold of and run with.
Education, learning, and self improvement sadly isn’t free. Every aspect of these cost in some way. Kicad, with it’s idiosyncracies gets a boost. It’s all fine, everyone still wins eventually. Well, that reasoning has one flaw – with those prices and licensing scheme no sane professional will buy it because there are much better options there for the same or not much more expensive price. And the small scale hobbyists and small companies that used it are now being priced out of the market. Eagle is not 3DS Max or Maya.
AutoDesk has bought those as well and their users have put up with AutoDesk’s crap, license cost hikes and what not because simply there isn’t anything else similarly capable on the market. People used it only because it was either free for them or cheap, not because it is a really good product. There is Diptrace, Design Spark or Altium products which are orders of magnitude better and more capable. I think AutoDesk will either quickly backtrack on this or Eagle is pretty much dead. Altium has tried the subscription pricing and always online/cloud only licensing with their CircuitMaker or what is it called and it was a fiasco. Nobody wants to be held hostage to the whims of the company like that. “there are much better options there for similar price.” Really?
My impression has always been that there were a bunch of “similar overall quality and similarly priced” CAD packages, and then there was a BIG GAP before you got to the $5k+ packages that “everybody” agreed were significantly better (OrCAD, Mentor, Altium.) (Altium is about $8k + $1750/y for the (non-mandatory) update subscription (after the first year) While I don’t like a subscription-based model, this is actually a price decrease compared to many of the competitors. I’ve got a lot of existing EAGLE designs that aren’t worth translating (plus ULPs and such), and a “permanent” 7.x license that will last me for a while in my non-profit status. It will take more than this change to make me move. (The interesting question is whether there WILL be additional changes.
The fear that prices will go up so I wouldn’t be able to continue to upgrade, while my old versions stop working, is pretty substantial). Westfw: Altium Circuti MAKER is free and has better capability than any Eagle package. The only issue is that it’s online only, which is an issue for some people. Altium’s Circuit Studio is $995. It has better performance and capabilities than any Eagle package. After 13months it’s $5 cheaper than Eagle.
Each year after that it’s $500 less expensive than Eagle. Altium Designer is their top of the line. It’s a one-time cost of $8k (you can get it for less depending on the season).
It blows all versions of Eagle out of the water. You can pay for a yearly subscription if you want (I don’t), but it only really keeps you at the latest version.
Their 2009 version has 99.99999% of the features and capabilities of their 2016 version. ” KiCad still doesn’t do basic things at the heart of why people love Eagle (real-time forward/back annotating for one!)” Actually this is one of the very reasons why I dropped Eagle and never got back to it – annotation happening without your knowledge/any intervention means (in particular for complex designs) risk of introducing severe errors. Also older versions of Eagle used to suddenly break the sync between SCH and PCB without possibility of recovery. Recent versions of Kicad (dev builds) let you annotate SCH-PCB by pressing a single button. You’ll also see immediately if anything went wrong and needs your attention. Not sure where your logic went KiCAD is open source and has a large community behind it. If the original authors get sick of it, run out of time money etc, someone else can always pick it up and carry on – and there are no licence issues, no copyrights etc to prevent that.
That’s the beauty of open source software. What do you deem “financially stable” anyway? Who says Autodesk will be here in another 10 years? Sure, Autodesk IS a huge company and going bankrupt is very unlikely. But strange things happen!
Who expected TI to buy National? Who expected Microchip to buy Atmel? We have no guarantee that either TI or Microchip will continue the product line of National and Atmel. Would you have said that National or Atmel were “Financially unstable”? Who says Eagle will live forever just because Autodesk is (currently) a big corporation?
You just can’t be sure of that. Say someone buys Autodesk and decides Eagle is not worth keeping. Maybe Cadsoft might say “Hey, we’ll have it back” or maybe some other company will offer to buy it. What’s the chance Autodesk whoever would just hand it over? Many times a company has been bought out or gone bankrupt and some software has been left in legal limbo because half the project is licensed to the original developers, while the other half licensed to the company that bought theirs. Nobody can come to an agreement, so the whole thing just ends up dead.
I’m not saying everything should be open source in case something bad happens. That doesn’t make much sense either. But if risk avoidance is your top priority because you want peace of mind over whether or not your software will be around in the future, find something open source and keep your own personal and updated copies of all the code. I invested all that time writing up documents in Star Office only to have to re-type them in OpenOffice and again in LibreOffice! And then there are all those applications I had to port from XFree to XOrg.
I lost soooo much data when I tried to convert my old MySQL databases to MariaDB! How could I ever again trust an open source program to be around in the future? For the Windows users that was all sarcasm and those are examples of what really happens when a popular open source program goes away. Somebody picks it up under a new name and you get to happily go on as though nothing changed because nothing did.