Case Study I Distribution
Give us the tools
How did RS Components’ free DesignSpark PCB design tool meet the needs of a company looking to make complex open-source designs freely available to the public?
D
uring 2010, the custom electronic design company Celeritous Technical Services needed access to a free
software tool that would allow it to make its complex open-source designs available to the public, in addition to providing an easy way to exchange its designs with its customers. The company trialled competitive free schematic capture and PCB design packages, including DesignSpark PCB from RS Components, to see which one could fulfil its needs.
Company Celeritous offers a wide range of electronic design services and products to its customers. Operating since 1997, the Texas- based company’s primary business is custom electronic-product design, including all aspects of design from concept to prototype. Celeritous also offers specialist tools that allow small businesses, universities, hobbyists, students and other individuals operating on a small budget to enter into the world of surface-mount assembly, rework and prototyping. All of its tools and products are tested and approved in its labs, with many of them used on a day-to-day basis by Celeritous design teams. Additionally, Celeritous offers a broad selection of electronic products designed and manufactured by the company, including development tools for microcontrollers and programmable logic, and several consumer products such as USB-to-serial cables that are compatible with blood glucose meters and their associated software.
Challenge
As a leading design services company, Celeritous already had an existing professional commercial software tool for schematic capture and PCB design, which the company continues to use today for certain projects. However, in addition to this commercial tool, the challenge for Celeritous was to find a free software tool that would enable it to make its complex open-source hardware designs available to the public. Celeritous also needed this tool as an exchange medium with its customers that either did not have their own design tools or had different ones.
Allen Litton, CEO at Celeritous, explained: “Many of our custom electronics-design projects stipulate that we have to provide complete project documentation to a customer. But, unless they had the same software tool, the best we could do was provide them with manufacturing files. However, this meant that they couldn’t perform any further modifications or produce additional documentation of their own.” Celeritous had already tried Eagle, which is the current de-facto free tool for open-source designs, but decided that it fell short of meeting their needs. “We found the Eagle user interface to be very awkward, and the free version of the software was too limited in its capabilities for most of our designs,” said Litton. “We even purchased a one-year license for the unlimited version of Eagle, for further evaluation, but we found that many basic features were either missing or were only available via third-party add-on software.
3d Test Case Layout
www.cieonline.co.uk
DesignSpark PCB However, after hearing about DesignSpark PCB via an electronics-oriented podcast, Celeritous downloaded the free software for further investigation. DesignSpark PCB is a fully integrated, powerful and easy-to-use intuitive PCB-design package. Available completely free
The first test case for Celeritous was porting its new mbed development board from its commercial PCB design tool to DesignSpark PCB. The company announced its mbed module baseboard/breakout board in August 2011, making it available in bare board, assembled and kit form. “We discovered that DesignSpark PCB had a highly professional user interface and, in fact, was similar to our existing commercial tool, enabling a very short learning curve,” said Litton. “Additionally, the free tool does not limit board size or board layers, or the number of nodes, and provides a lot of native features that are, quite simply, not offered by competing free tools. DesignSpark PCB allowed us to port the mbed design from our existing tool very quickly.” Additionally, Celeritous
discovered that
DesignSpark community was highly responsive in providing feedback and answering questions. The
Schematic Components in Electronics December 2011/January 2012 15
Wizard
with no license restrictions on the terms of use and no time limit on the license, the package includes schematic capture, PCB layout, autorouter and manufacturing plots. DesignSpark PCB also supports unlimited PCB layers and board area (up to 1m2), unlimited schematic sheets per project, and can generate industry- standard output files such as Gerber (RS- 274-X) files, Excellon, DXF and IDF. In addition, the package now allows a real- life view of the PCB layout via its new 3D Viewer.
DesignSpark community offers electronics engineers a wealth of technical information and resources, user reviews and new free tools to speed up the electronics design process. Celeritous has now released its mbed
board design as open source with full schematics and layout in DesignSpark PCB. The mbed board provides essential I/O, prototyping areas, access to all mbed signals as well as various extra peripherals for rapid development of user interfaces and applications.
Adoption
Celeritous has been using the DesignSpark package for around nine months now, and following the successful test case the company has migrated several designs from its commercial tool to DesignSpark PCB and is now adopting it for delivery of its complex open-source designs, as well as using it as the exchange medium with its customers.
“No longer is open-source hardware limited in board size and complexity. Now we have a common design interchange format with customers and vendors alike. DesignSpark PCB has allowed us to
provide a complete documentation package along with a no-cost solution for our customers to edit and modify designs in the future. And, very importantly, it has also enabled us to provide design files for open-sourced hardware in a format that is accessible to the general public,” concluded Litton.
Further information on DesignSpark PCB is available at:
www.designspark.com/pcb
Celeritous |
www.celeritous.com
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