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Re:Upverter - Hardware design tools for the web by femto on Thursday February 02, 2012 @07:07PM (#3545171)
The schematic is a small part of a full design flow. What hooks does it have to be integrated into a full design flow? Without such hooks it will be limited to rudimentary circuits.

What support is there for hardware description languages? HDL is good for large projects and is more reusable than a schematic.

One suggestion is to have a component library that is shared among all users. Each person adds components as they need them, and the library grows, as a community resource over time. Maybe you have that already? If you do have it, what license covers the library? Is it covered by the same open source license as the schematics of the users that generated the library? In that case, is it free for any user to export and reuse in full? Such a feature would negate some of the "vampire" accusations leveled by the dangerousprototypes review.

What's the advantage over gEDA, gHDL or similar? Most people with the knowledge to design a circuit would also have the knowledge to set up a tool chain and repository. Who's the market?

Re:Upverter - Hardware design tools for the web by bisrig on Thursday February 02, 2012 @09:34PM (#3545458)
OK, I'll bite. Are there tool/design flows out in the wild using HDLs in the PCB design process? I guess describing basic connectivity is relatively easy to imagine, but it's less obvious how you would do things like PCB layout etc. Would love to be pointed towards examples.

(FPGA guy here - used to using VHDL/Verilog for digital logic simulation and synthesis, never considered it for board design)

Re:Upverter - Hardware design tools for the web by zakhomuth on Thursday February 02, 2012 @07:24PM (#3545212)
Zak from upverter again...

Our HDL support is non-existant right now. We do have an open file format which can be created from or parsed to HDL. Do you work in HDL right now? I'd love to chat about this with you sometime - we come from the world of very large system design and there is almost no HDL usage at the system design level.

We do have a common library, all community entered and more than half edited by someone different than the creator. The library is free and public. We have a number of users of the library who havent yet adopted the rest of the upverter tool chain.

Re:Upverter - Hardware design tools for the web by fieldforceapp on Thursday February 02, 2012 @08:00PM (#3545284)
Don't want to discourage you guys, but coming from an EDA background myself, you didn't answer the question: > What's the advantage over gEDA, gHDL or similar?

I think your answer is, "we're focused on design & community." But I wonder if you might reconsider yourselves the "Codecademy of hardware" instead?