Need simulations of high speed signals based on your board layout? Altium gives you tools to do that. Need to follow exact IPC/JEDEC-standards on your footprints, naming schemes, pads? Altium gives you tools to do that properly. And if it does mess up something, one can point to a reports that were filed by the software that who made the change, when it was made and who checked and accepted it to be made and what was the change. it’s user interface complicated compared to Eagle, and can be very tedious when it forces you to follow certain (at first hand convoluted) practices to update data and board and back/forward annotate.īut those practices are in place exactly for a reason of putting checks in place to prevent you from ignoring DRC/ERC warnings or making a change to a component/board/anything in the vault or the design without it being checked, verified, accepted and reported. I’m the opposite, I started and pretty much mastered Eagle, but it left me being incapable of really pushing the envelope with High-Speed design, intregrated simulation and very complex commercial projects that are done with larger team or with tight integration with mechanical and product design teams.Īnd rest of this might sound like Altium advertisement, but it’s based on my personal experiences using it. Posted in Software Development Tagged altium, binary file, eda, file, file format, json, reverse engineering Post navigation With a little bit of code, managed to dump all these text records into a pseudo plain text format, then convert everything into JSON. Looking through the lens of this file format, found all the content was held in a stream called ‘FileHeader’, everything was an array of strings (yeah, everything is in text), and lines of text are separated by ‘|’ in name=value pairs. It turns out, Altium uses something called a Compound Document File, similar to what Office uses for Word and PowerPoint files, to store all the information. Yeah, this is as raw as it can possibly get, but simply by scrolling through the file, he was able to find some interesting bits hanging around the file. ’s first step towards using an Altium file with his own tools was opening it up with a hex editor. Altium is one of the worst offenders, but by diving into the binary files it’s possible to reverse engineer these proprietary file formats into something nearly human-readable. Not all EDA softwares are created equally, and a lot of vendors use binary file formats as a way to keep their market share. Now anyone can write their own design tools for Eagle without mucking about with binary files. Several times in the last few weeks, I’ve heard people say, ‘this will be the last PCB I design in Eagle.’ That’s bad news for CadSoft, but if there’s one thing Eagle has done right, its their switch to an XML file format.
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