You may scoff at this, but think about it: simply due to my vocation, I look at a lot of PCBs made by amateurs. I am, perhaps, the world’s leading expert at assessing poorly designed and just plain shitty PCBs.
#REVIEW AUTOTRAX DEX SOFTWARE#
Just because a piece of software is important doesn’t mean it’s good. It was the inspiration for CircuitLab, and the Fritzing influence can easily be seen in Autodesk’s 123D Circuits. The story of the ‘maker movement’ – however ill-defined that phrase is – cannot be told without mentioning Fritzing. Despite what the Fritzing’s Wikipedia talk page claims, Fritzing is an important piece of software. Simply by virtue of being an editor for Hackaday, I have seen thousands of homebrew PCBs, and tens of thousands of amateur and hobbyist electronics projects. I feel it is necessary to contextualize Fritzing in the space of ‘maker movement’, DIY electronics, and the last decade of Hackaday. It is frequently compared to Processing, Wiring, or Arduino in that it provides an easy way for artists, creatives, or ‘makers’ to dip their toes into the waters of PCB design. We’re done with Eagle, and now it’s time to move onto Fritzing.įritzing came out of the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Applied Sciences of Potsdam in 2007 as a project initiated by Professor Reto Wettach, André Knörig and Zach Eveland. This week, we’re continuing our Creating A PCB In Everything series, where we go through the steps to create a simple, barebones PCB in different EDA suites. If anyone has any insight to what the Protel / Altium legal department was doing a few decades ago, your wisdom is welcome in the comments.Ĭontinue reading “Creating A PCB In Everything: Protel Autotrax” → Posted in Hackaday Columns, how-to, Skills Tagged Autotrax, Creating a PCB in Everything, how-to, Protel, tutorial This is weird, confusing, and I can’t figure out how this doesn’t violate a trademark. A company called DEX 2020 has also has a PCB design software called AutoTRAX. Interestingly, Protel Autotrax is not the only PCB design software named Autotrax. A freeware version of Autotrax is still available on the Altium website and can be run from inside a DOS virtual machine or DOSBox. Protel was a reaction to this and the first product, Autotrax, was a DOS-based program that brought PCB design to the PC. Back in the day, PCB design on a computer required a dedicated workstation, a lot of hardware, light pens, and everything was extraordinarily expensive. The company we know as Altium today was, for the first fifteen years of its existence, known as Protel. A short history of Protel, Altium, and Autotrax
#REVIEW AUTOTRAX DEX SERIES#
Overall, this series provides for a comparison between different PCB design tools. We learned Fritzing is a joke for PCB design, although it is quite good for making breadboard graphics of circuits. Each of these tutorials serves as a very quick introduction to a specific PCB design tool. We’ve already covered Eagle in this series.
In this series, we take a standard reference circuit and PCB layout - a simple ATtiny85 board - and build it with different PCB design tools.
#REVIEW AUTOTRAX DEX HOW TO#
This is the continuation of a series of articles demonstrating how to Create A PCB In Everything. Beyond this, I suggest viewing EEVblog #747, where digs into one of his old project, Borland Pascal, and Protel Autotrax. I’m rolling up my sleeves (about 30 years worth of rolling) and building our standardized test PCB with the tool. But it’s important to know where we came from to understand the EDA tools available now.
I’m not recommending anyone actually use Protel Autotrax - better tools with better support exist. Consider this a look at the history of PCB design software. Protel Autotrax is a PCB design tool first released for DOS in the mid-80s.
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