For sure, we have been pretty focused on the low level part of the language, I think it will be interesting to see how our language evolves as we are able to abstract away more of the low level connectivity and configuration. I think eventually we will end up building something like a python library on top of ato to get the best of both worlds.
Indeed, we think the community aspect of this is super important. Being able to reuse high quality work confidently is very nice. Our export is pretty cool already! We build outputs in CI on a server, ready to drag and drop directly into JLC, including BOM and PNP files.
Being able to use git was our fundamental motivator, we all previously worked a big companies and found it maddening that we couldnt work in parallel on projects without breaking everything.
On parts specs, for sure, we currently capture all the data you would see on JLCs website. We do have dielectric and voltage ratings for caps. Eventually we plan to scrape a bunch of datasheets to build out a high quality dataset, I am very excited about this!
Thanks! We definitely want to get involved on the education side. Currently we are super focused on building out the tool and growing a community around it. We are looking for people to use our tool and give feedback on what works and what sucks. Would be excited to chat about what you would want to see from an education standpoint!
cool, i believe this is a scenario where targeted educational/univ. chats could help further enterprise trials (or early constructive feedback). would be great to chat more on discord/email!
We had a look at a few options before doing our own. A few thoughts;
Building a DSL allows us to keep it really simple to start, we tried using SKIDL ( a very cool python project) and found it was pretty easy to get your self in a weird spot, the language would let users do things like create a component and not hold a reference to it.
Units and tolerances are core to our language, the physical world is 'fuzzy' and having a good way to deal with those we think is pretty important.
We are also trying to make it as readable and friendly as possible, our expectation is our users will likely have some experience with python and perhaps a little C back in school, so making it clear and approachable is front of mind.
Very open to critiques on our choices! We still very much in development.
They do have this, its called EasyEDA. In my experience its not as good as kicad and definitely not as good as the 'professional' tools like cadence and altium. Our tool does basically do that though! We have a big library of kicad components that can be used in your designs as well as an import just about any JLC component just using its JLCPN. We love their service, would love to see that model proliferated to other companies also, so hard to beat having parts available and in stock.
For fun I did have a play with GPTs doing a little fine tuning on some ato code. Definitely not my domain, but pretty amazing how quickly it kinndaa worked. Our focus at the moment is building out the layer that designers (human or otherwise) can operate on. I do think that we need some pretty solid testing infrastructure for us to get to a place where we would ship 'black box' pcbs. Maybe one day.
For sure, there will always be some 'user' type requirements that we need to build a way to input, for starters it will be something like a lock file with component positions of things you need in a particular spot. I see alot of value in automating things you just dont care about, particularly if 'sensible' rules can be applied. For example if the tool could automatically determine trace widths, not just at a net level, but for each link based on how hot you were happy for it to get and what loads it would see.
