JITX – The Fastest Way to Design Circuit Boards

https://www.jitx.com

by Teever • 2 years ago

193 96 2 years ago

Well, this sure seems like an ad. Anyone actually use it? Probably not going to sway me away from KiCAD even for a moment.

cushychicken5• 2 years ago

Their offering is a CAD tool plugin, not a freestanding CAD tool.

DHaldane14• 2 years ago

Thank you for this comment! Would you pretty please help me debug my website - what makes JITX seem like a CAD plugin?

(it is a freestanding tool)

zachbee• 2 years ago

There are so many different tools to help design and route PCBs now. You have DeepPCB, Flux, and Quilter doing auto-routing, and SKiDL, CuFlow, and JITX doing programmatic schematics (and also sometimes auto-routing?).

To be honest, I don't really understand how these tools are differentiated from one another. I personally know the Quilter guys, so if I had to pick I'd use their product, but I don't think the market crowding here is great for anybody.

krasin• 2 years ago

I don't think the market crowding here is great for anybody.

In the end, the users will win from this crowding, I suppose.

tonyarkles• 2 years ago

In the end, the users will win from this crowding, I suppose.

I'm not so sure about that. A while ago I was really excited about Altium introducing CircuitStudio (the first iteration, I think they have a new product with the same name that's completely different). CircuitStudio was pitched as Altium-lite. I paid, I believe, $3000 for it (with some kind of maintenance license?) and absolutely loved it. A year or so later they reached out to me to let me know that they were changing their licensing costs to $900/year or something like that and that they wanted to reward me as an early adopter by giving me a lifetime license.

But... the product didn't, as far as I can tell, ever get enough traction to actually become a long-term-viable product. Eagle, at the time, was I think $1000 for a professional license (way before Autodesk bought Eagle). CircuitStudio was, to me, a dramatically better product than Eagle. But where I've ended up with this... I have a perpetual license for a product that stopped getting updates years ago. No one I work with has software that's compatible with it and they can't just buy a license. It's a total albatross that I keep around essentially so that I can open my old designs.

New designs? They're in KiCAD now. While I really don't love KiCAD, no one's going to pull the rug out from under me. I can share designs with clients & colleagues and they can open them and work with them. 10 years from now I'll be able to, worst case scenario, run Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM with KiCAD 7 and open the designs (that's assuming KiCAD 37 in 2034 doesn't still have backwards compatibility support :)).

Cloud-based ECAD scares me even more. A year or two ago I needed to debug an issue with a super old design for a client. The schematic and board layouts were done in Protel 99SE (Altium Designer before it became Altium). I installed it, opened the design no problem, and extracted the info I needed. Will JITX still be around in 25 years? If they go out of business... what happens to all of my designs? Exporting to PDF and Gerbers is an OK step but doesn't help me at all if I need to actually interact with the design.

A crowded market is great for downward pressure on price, but it's really not great for companies to survive long-term in a relatively small niche market.

rock_hard2• 2 years ago

Flux founder here

Our mission is to take the “hard” out of hardware

We have 240k users on the platform…hobbyists, students, small/mid sized teams to Fortune50 companies. We host millions of projects!

It’s a huge ecosystem not just of users but also semiconductor manufacturers, fab houses, etc.

Think GitHub on steroids!

And it’s the only AI first end-to-end design tool in the market…you can go from idea to research to architecture to BOM to schematic to PCB layout and then to manufacturing. Workflows that usually take months in other tools can be done in a few hours to minutes in flux.

It’s still early days though but we are moving insanely fast! So if we don’t met your teams bar today I suggest checking back in next month.

I think it’s good for more players to enter the market…EDA tooling is stuck somewhere in the 80s and we need to fix that.

It’s too expensive and risky to make hardware…and we deserve better!

kelvie• 2 years ago

Perhaps related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39263854 ?

Or to save a click: https://github.com/atopile/atopile

I'm a hobbyist PCB designer, and a hobbyist (and generally happy) openSCAD user, with the BOSL2 library, and a hobbyist ESPHome user and I would really love some code alternative to KiCad.

It also sounds like maybe I have too many hobbies.

stavros• 2 years ago

That's not nearly enough hobbies. Try making/flying RC planes/drones, it's super fun and neatly combines with your other hobbies.

midnightclubbed2• 2 years ago

This looks interesting, as a hobbyist with a EEE background and a programming career I like the idea of designing circuits using code.

But maybe I'm not the target audience here... pricing seems high for anyone who is not using this commercially (and at scale). $1000 per month (or $60 a day, which I don't really understand the utility of).

Zamiel_Snawley2• 2 years ago

Their yearly option is only 18% off too, at $9,804.

jrmcauliffe2• 2 years ago

Sigh, remembers when Visual Age for Java was $10k a seat in 2000 $$$.

DHaldane14• 2 years ago

We are certainly focused on the professional market for monetization -- turns out this software is hard to build and we need to pay smart people to work on it.

Not to say we won't have an open free/freemium offering soon. Hobbyists needed the new layout tool we just shipped last Tuesday, so it's much closer now.

wrs2• 2 years ago

The pricing page does list a free educational (“and open source”) offering. The application form only talks about educational, though. Can you say more about what that is?

mistercow• 2 years ago

I’m not in your target market at this point, but in the 3D CAD space, I’ve noticed that several companies have gone with free licensing for non-commercial use, and those tools end up getting practically all of the of exposure in the maker niches on YouTube.

It seems like a smart — if long term — strategy, since today’s young hobbyists are likely going to be a significant number of tomorrow’s founders, choosing the software their companies use.

It is admittedly a little different. Hobbyists getting into 3D printing are surely more common than hobbyists designing and ordering PCBs. But the latter is more accessible to low volume customers than it’s ever been.

blagie3• 2 years ago

My advice would be to have two versions:

- Paid, which supports private designs.

- Free, where every design is open-licensed and discoverable.

There are approximately zero companies which will want their IP open. On the other hand, this makes this available to approximately 100% of the university and hobbyist market.

Don't cripple the free version in any way beyond that.

The one lesson I learned watching CAD and other professional markets for decades: You want your tool used in university classes. Heck, if there weren't conflicts-of-interest, it'd be worth paying universities to adopt your tool.

Hobbyists are less important (although there have been many examples of hobbyist projects turning into major companies).

romwell• 2 years ago

turns out this software is hard to build and we need to pay smart people to work on it.

Well, I'm reasonably smart (math PhD, FAANG experience, etc), and I interviewed with you a couple of years ago.

Went through all technical rounds, didn't get the job.

I've spent some time with Meta since then, and made enough money that pay isn't a priority for me now. Especially for a project like this that I both believe in, and see as a great fit for my background.

I'm looking for the next move now, and I still would love to be with JITX.

Pay me less. Let me help you being your vision to reality.

vasco• 2 years ago

turns out this software is hard to build and we need to pay smart people to work on it.

This makes no sense, plenty of very hard things target B2C / freemium. It's perfectly fine if that isn't your business model, but explaining it like this is not useful. Look at OpenAI for example, are they only paying cheap salaries since their plans are either free or $20?

midnightclubbed2• 2 years ago

Concentrating on the professional market is a perfectly valid business model. I would assume you either need a completely compelling and unique product that is a no-brainer for those companies, or a good marketing team to break you into businesses with existing and entrenched tooling.

schreiaj• 2 years ago

So https://github.com/BerkeleyHCI/PolymorphicBlocks?tab=readme-... may be of interest to you.

It's ok, I did play with it a bit but the tooling was a bit of a pain to get set up. Not going to be as polished but it's not $1000/mo either.

(It looks like JITX is handling layout and PB is dealing with the netlist side, but it's in the same space)

nine_k2• 2 years ago

Paying $60 a day could a good way to give a contractor / expert / collaborator temporary access to your design to help solve a specific issue.

SV_BubbleTime4• 2 years ago

Or, I can keep using KiCAD and have my contractors work on it for no extra cost.

Zamiel_Snawley2• 2 years ago

Commercial license is $1000/month. How does that compare to other EDA software?

mattofak• 2 years ago

Altium is about $10k to start and then $2.5k ~ 3.5k per year depending on plan.

bb88• 2 years ago

My favorite is the hobbyist youtube videos sponsored by Altium. Just pay 10k plus 2/3k per year afterwards and you too can design boards like I can! (/s)

But the reality is I unsubscribed from those creators, because I never want to see someone design a board in Altium, I want to see how they build a board using kicad.

From the software side, I really like the license model of the all products pack from JetBrains. And it goes with me wherever I go.

spacedcowboy2• 2 years ago

Altium is sufficiently good [1] though that for a personal license, you don't really need the yearly updates (which are mainly focused on their core business of large companies anyway). Source: bought permanent license, haven't update it.

[1] for example it has a built-in field solver for diff-pair impedance, not the approximations that vary from online tool to online tool

fxtentacle• 2 years ago

KiCad is free and has a great community, which means lots of projects to download.

Workaccount25• 2 years ago

And lots of people who can provide support. And lots of youtube tutorials.

sambull• 2 years ago

It's probably changed, Cadence software used to have a on-site person colocated out at my dad's office just to support it day to day.

themoonisachees2• 2 years ago

Cadence is a whole different beast entirely. My job buys something like 20 seats of SPECTRE a year, among other tools, and EDA licenses are our #1 spending item, above workforce.

hulitu2• 2 years ago

Dedicated to solving difficult problems with huge impact, our first step is to automate circuit board design.

I would say it doesn't compare.

cushychicken5• 2 years ago

I have to give JITX credit - every time I see their latest product offering, it gets closer to something I’d actually use. (Working EE who primarily does board and system design.)

These layout automations they show in the landing page are the first thing they’ve showcased that I’m intrigued enough to want to try for myself.

The thing I wonder about with all of these EDA companies is whether any of them understand that they’re not attacking the biggest problem of circuit design.

Capturing the SCH/PCB is a relatively small part of the process of getting a working design ready to sell. Less than ten percent of the time, I’d guess. The bulk goes in to design documentation, testing, certification, compliance, and DFM/DFA.

A part of me sort of hates to see these companies do their thing, because it’s making the fun part of the job shorter and faster.

DHaldane14• 2 years ago

Thanks! We're working hard -- I just added that animation this morning and I have a few more to do.

I like your perspective on tackling the biggest problem. We can show a lot more of how users have been doing automation for firmware, docs, testing, etc ...

An underrated part of an autorouter is that you can enforce rules for DFM (and SI) automatically, so some of that tougher stuff is addressable with the right approach. Including a lot of compliance.

Certainly not trying to shrink the fun part - tried to make layout more of an optimization tool than a drafting tool. Although "I should not be doing this" is a mentality a lot of EEs bring to layout.

cushychicken5• 2 years ago

I like your perspective on tackling the biggest problem

I’d be happy to generate some additional perspectives on your tool if there’s a way I can try it without spending $10k or going back to college for an .edu email address XD

An underrated part of an autorouter is that you can enforce rules for DFM (and SI) automatically, so some of that tougher stuff is addressable with the right approach. Including a lot of compliance.

You must be referring to an autorouter tool I’ve never tried. (Maybe your own?) All the ones I’ve ever seen produce trace fanouts that look like regurgitated spaghetti.

"I should not be doing this" is a mentality a lot of EEs bring to layout.

Probably explains why so many EEs struggle to get their designs to pass radiated emissions compliance tests. Layout is still circuit design: you just don’t know any of the component values you’re dealing with. Gotta learn to make good choices once you understand how board parasitics work.

Unrelated - I’m pretty sure I spoke with you or one of your cofounders about your product in comments when you first launched. I asked you about emissions compliance and I think DDR trace matching and routing in a comment thread. Glad to see you got at least one of those problems licked.

bfrog• 2 years ago

I’ve never understood layout as being secondary. The artwork matters a great deal ensuring the design works and works well.

cushychicken5• 2 years ago

Also - as a side note - everyone in this comment thread kvetching about your tool’s price clearly doesn’t understand:

1) the value a good EE design brings to an organization, or

2) the amount of money selling electronics is worth to a company

You have to feed yourselves and your employees, and all the companies who really need this tool are ones that have no problem spending 10k per year to make their engineers more effective. (Thinking of Lockheed Martin here as they’re one of your flagship customers.)

The average Kicad hobbiest wants this, but doesn’t need it. At least, not in the same way someone with a boss, a program manager, a deadline, and four projects to support does.

fool14712• 2 years ago

A part of me sort of hates to see these companies do their thing, because it’s making the fun part of the job shorter and faster.

For sure! PCB layout is one of the best and most enjoyable parts of the job.

My major concern with these products is always the quality of the schematics they produce. It's not enough for a schematic to have all the nets connected correctly - a schematic is a piece of documentation that, when drawn well, should convey a lot more information than simply what pin is connected to which others.

gabesullice• 2 years ago

I'm not an EE, so please understand this as a sincere question: wouldn't the code and its comments become documentation that would otherwise be in the well-drawn schematic?

As an outsider, my assumption is that the schematic would become less of a design document and more of a simple visualization.

What am I missing?

dr_kiszonka3• 2 years ago

(Apologies for my plebeian question to all EEs here.)

Is there software that would tell me what I need to buy to make this [Arduino QT Py] work with [this specific set of 200 IC LEDs]? Alternatively, how can I check if a specific combination of components would work together? I spent a few hours with Flux and EasyEDA, but didn't get far.

namibj• 2 years ago

I suggest a thorough discussion with GPT-4, based on datasheet information of the given parts, to talk through options for interfacing and then attempting to flesh them out and find concrete parts.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

I'd rather ask at a specific forum, e.g. https://electronics.stackexchange.com/

rock_hard2• 2 years ago

You are in luck

Flux.ai does that…have a look at this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y56AqPOjp0k&t=366s

Flux Copilot will happily assist you going from an idea to selecting the right components all the way to manufactured board!

dr_kiszonka3• 2 years ago

Thanks! I replied to your colleague's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39783812

markwu2001• 2 years ago

Hey! I can't see your links to the LEDs or the QT Py, but I'm assuming they're probably neopixels as you mentioned "IC" LEDs. Drag your parts into flux and just ask copilot how to connect them together properly. Just to speculate on your project, you probably want some sort of gate buffer for the neopixel signal. And just ensure whatever power source you are using (be it a 5V source or a battery or buck boost converter) can handle the total current draw of those LEDs. I believe they have a wide operating voltage, but also just double check that if you are using a constant voltage source (which you probably are), it isn't over the maximum forward voltage of the LEDs. You can ask in detail with copilot by the way!

Just wanted to echo some more resources to get you oriented. The second video shows actual examples of how to leverage copilot in your exact scenario. Flux End to End tutorial: https://youtu.be/Nz-XvvlozK4 AI Architecture Exploration: https://youtu.be/iGJOzVf0o7o

dr_kiszonka3• 2 years ago

Thanks for your reply, Mark!

The challenge for me is that the parts I'd like to use are not in the Flux library (or I can't find them). If I understand correctly, I would need to add them manually. To make sure I can use your simulator to check if all parts would work together, I would have to write some code, which is, sadly, way above my skill level. (I am fine with writing code, I just don't know enough about this domain.) I do like the Copilot feature, but, based on your video, it seems that I would need to add some properties that I don't much about. Just to be clear, Flux looks great, but it is perhaps for more advanced folks than me.

Regarding my specific project, I would like to use:

1. Adafruit QT Py ESP32 Pico - WiFi Dev Board with STEMMA QT - 8MB Flash 2MB PSRAM (ESP32-PICO-V3-02): https://www.adafruit.com/product/5395

2. BTF-LIGHTING WS2812B IC RGB 5050SMD Pure Gold Individual Addressable LED Strip (one or two strips): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CDTECSG

I also figured out that I should probably use:

3. Adafruit NeoDriver - I2C to NeoPixel Driver Board - Stemma QT: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5766

I haven't found these components in Flux.

hulitu2• 2 years ago

You need to study some EE to underestand what is going on. May the magic smoke be with you. /s

spacedcowboy2• 2 years ago

Yeah, looks awesome but as someone who forked out for a permanent Altium license for myself, there's no way I'm paying $1k/month for it ....

m-hilgendorf• 2 years ago

As a former employee (2019-2021) it's heartwarming to see the comments shift from where they were five years ago to where they are today. The idea was proven out!

Keep up the excellent work, seeing the autorouter come to fruition and demoed on the homepage is a massive accomplishment and mind blowing.

DHaldane14• 2 years ago

Thanks Mike! We're still in VSCode -- thank you for kicking off that very first extension.

wkoszek• 2 years ago

Great work! I really hope that you guys end up having a ton of industry interest. Really see JITX being a positive addition to the whole EDA toolchain. I remember several efforts from within the industry where even during copy&paste from reference designs, the mistakes were made and the PCB batch was ending in a trash.

Once the library of snippets gets beefy, and people can build boards with their Raspberry Pis and Zeros on them, it'll be a critical mass.

Good luck!

ipsum2• 2 years ago

It's interesting that OpenAI is listed, presumably as a customer. Wonder what chips they're making? Probably not GPUs/TPUs, but maybe a data collection unit or consumer board?

matthewfelgate• 2 years ago

This looks amazing.

ShuffleBoard• 2 years ago

AIUI JITX has potential to serve non-mainstream markets, including hobbyists, in ways that people aren't really imagining at this point.

Unfortunately for them, though, the mainstream market, along with all of the incumbents, is where the $$ is that would fund non-mainstream support. If the prime rate was still ~0% you might see a strategy out of JITX wherein they'd first take some spectacular swings for the fences in smaller markets. Those kind of successes would make quite the splash here.

But now they've got to go fight it out for the enterprise seats, and, for a half-dozen reasons, post-haste. If they can manage that successfully, I expect they'll soon also be able to do great things for hobbyists, on hobbyist budgets.

SV_BubbleTime4• 2 years ago

Hobbiest friendly with a $1k per month license the second you want to sell something?

Ok, disagree though.

DHaldane14• 2 years ago

Hey - you got this very correct. Good insights as to what we're up to. Grueling to build product for the pros, but once done it can support a lot of people.

Good automation can dissolve false dichotomies.

dangoodmanUT• 2 years ago

I nearly passed out when I saw the intensely squiggly traces

ekimehtor2• 2 years ago

I've been out of this industry for a while now so my thoughts may be a bit dated but it seems to me that the current trend is components suppliers and board manufactures are offering design solutions has it value added resource to there customers. E.g. Element 14 or seeds studio. And down

ekimehtor2• 2 years ago

Sorry for the typos, I'm a quadriplegic using Voice dictation on an Apple iPad and sometimes it gets words wrong [especially homonyms]

DHaldane14• 2 years ago

Seems right - Renesas just acquired Altium after all. Varies a lot by customer.

mips_r4300i• 2 years ago

Good idea and concept. I fully support the idea.

Being able to specify a generic part requirement instead of hunting for a specific part is nice sometimes, but any company that makes more than a couple boards already has this covered with a bom management system.

Adding parts via text is nice and fast, but also glosses over many aspects of the part. Say I use a Diodes Inc buck regulator. It has a valid input voltage range it will accept. It has multiple ways it can be wired depending on the application. Wire for buck, septic, etc. PFM on/auto/off, etc. I don't see control over details like that.

Your About Us page is longer and more extensive than your actual product example page.

I see 4-5 very basic designs that I could bang out in Altium in under a day each. Are you selling to people unable to make PCBs? I look for ways to save time because I wear many hats in my job, only 1 of which is doing a board. However, I would not be able to save any time using this tool, because it would produce an inferior result. Additionally, after only 8 months of paying for this product, someone can already afford a full Altium license.

I want to save time on stuff like breaking out and pin swapping IO on a large FPGA. Handle DDR3 routing for me. These are things that actually take time, because you need to understand the device and read through tons of PDFs. However, I think that might also be the most difficult part to add to your product.

Finally, how does it handle physical constraints like non- square board outlines, mounting hole placement, and 3d STEP integration?

DHaldane14• 2 years ago

Good set of questions, and thanks for the feedback. Currently updating the website to add this stuff.

Comments/answers to questions in order:

1. Yes, finding a single resistor is easy. Part solving is more about making parametric circuits possible. (like a buck regulator that can configure itself on SS, output voltage). There you need to calculate values from parameters and then go find a part you can actually buy. Doing that manually is less magical of an experience.

2. Yes - some example code here (have not documented yet, apologies) https://github.com/JITx-Inc/jitx-cookbook/blob/main/regulato...

3. Our customers are professional EEs doing really complex work (e.g. many 30Ghz SERDES), and our website is drastically out of date. Will update design on site soon - this post was some guy submitting our landing page to HN. I'm trying to keep up!

4. Yes, this works already. Was very hard to do on the product side, design code was relatively simple. DDR3 example here - https://youtu.be/bw4KxhV-d8g

5. Physical constraints are imported or generated - works quite well to automatically sync electromechanicals. Mutliple 3D models including STEP can be added to parts, again I need to update the website.

darksaints• 2 years ago

I'm curious here...I've only ever gotten deep enough into pcb design to modify an open source motor controller. What does this give you that I couldn't get out of KiCad? From what I can tell, there are autorouters and autolayout and design rule checks. Is it just better execution?

Karliss2• 2 years ago

I just noticed if you click "start trial" it will automatically add 1 $1000 license to cart. Really? Doing classic hidden subscription dark patterns for a $1000/month software. It's already shitty thing to do for a $15 streaming services, but for something like this I would expect a more professional attitude.

macleodan• 2 years ago

Your signup and contact forms are broken and tell me 405 not allowed.

JITX – The Fastest Way to Design Circuit Boards

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