Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by Liftyee on Monday February 05, 2024 @12:55PM (#39264222)

Looks really useful! As a hardware designer I've had plenty of copy pasting bits of schematics to duplicate common functionality. Seems like this could be really helpful in preventing mistakes and increasing quality once used to it.

Have you got any plans for defined interfaces/modularity so devices using SPI, I²C, etc. can be chained together without manually defining pin connections? Also, will there be support for importing schematics from other formats?

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Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by napowderly on Monday February 05, 2024 @01:00PM (#39264332)

We do have interfaces! They are super useful, I am very stoked that I dont have to remember which way around MISO/MOSI go any more.

Interfaces are just a collection of signals eg

  interface I2C:
    signal sda
    signal scl
    signal gnd

you can connect two together like so: micro.i2c ~ sensor.i2c

Importing schematics would be possible, but IMO not super valuable as all we could import would be the raw connectivity, a big benefit of our language is being able to add a layer of abstraction on that.

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Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by xnzakg on Monday February 05, 2024 @03:40PM (#39266839)

How does this handle connecting two microcontrollers with one being a SPI master and one being a slave? Or connecting UART between two devices?

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Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by napowderly on Monday February 05, 2024 @03:54PM (#39267020)

Today, poorly. We just do a dumb matching of signal names. I imagine we will do something like add a property to the interfaces on each device.

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Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by wildzzz on Monday February 05, 2024 @01:28PM (#39264808)

Kicad allows you to keep a library of projects containing layouts and schematics of small circuits that you may wish to reuse in other circuits by just simply importing them to the current design. You can then modify as needed.

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Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by napowderly on Monday February 05, 2024 @01:31PM (#39264881)

Indeed, Altium has similar features also. I think what has been missing is an effective way to collaborate on hardware projects as a community and be able to share them like you would packages on pypi or npm.

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