OSHW

Hi, Element14. First off, let  me tell you how much I like Eagle. I bought version 4 back in 2001 for $1212. (Schematic editor, pcb layout and auto-router - woo hoo! Times were good.) Then in 2004, I upgraded to V4.1 for $315. (I don't know why I had to pay for a minor release, but there you go.) Finally, I went to V5 in 2009 for $400. I've never regretted my choice - over the years, Eagle has gotten better and better and my total outlay is still less than $2000. I can hardly get a schematic editor in one of the major CAD packages for that.

But I haven't made the move to V6. The price tag for me is around $600 and for that I get two new features: differential trace routing and design files stored as XML. Diff traces would be nice, and I guess XML files will be great once people create some cool tools for processing them. But to me, it's not a lot for $600. (Not that I begrudge you the right to profit from providing an excellent tool.) But more than the price, the main reason I'm not upgrading is because Eagle is isolating me from the community.

I corresponded with Fabrizio Tappero yesterday and he tells me that hardcopy versions of Free Range VHDL will be available in a couple of weeks. As I wrote previously, this introductory VHDL book is open-source and freely available on the net. Naturally, the authors received a lot of feedback from readers which they used to spiff-up the text before rolling the printing presses.

A new VHDL textbook was released a few days ago. *Yawn*, right? There's like a hundred of those on Amazon already.

But the good thing about this one is that it covers the basics of using VHDL in a concise and attractive 129 pages. It goes over the syntax and semantics of the language and illustrates behavioral and structural description styles with an emphasis on synthesis. But you don't have to take my word that this book is good - you can download Free Range VHDL for free!

I wrote last month about using Upverter, and now there's a new OSHW repository on the scene: Solderpad. While Upverter is trying to provide both cloud-based design tools and a repository, Solderpad has taken a more modest path and provides only a place for you to store your designs after you've used whatever tool you want to create them. So you might ask how that's any different from just storing your design on Github. Well, in addition to the Git-based repository, Solderpad adds these capabilities:

• You can pan-and-zoom on a multi-page schematic of a design.
• You can pan-and-zoom on a view of the PCB of a design.
• You can view and download a bill-of-materials (BOM) for a design. You can also click on a component in the BOM and get a bunch of information about it from Octopart, which is pretty neat.

Upverter is a website/service that allows people to collaborate on hardware designs. It looks like they've got some VC funding and they're pitching themselves to the OSHW community as the place to store their designs.

A DangerousPrototypes blog post called Upverter a "closed source vampire" for trying to profit from the OSHW community while still keeping their web-based tools closed. Kinda harsh. Without knowing the Upverter people's true intentions, I can't say if it's true or not. Regardless, I don't care. I'm a pragmatist and I'll use anything that's effective - open or closed - to get my design done.