Hello Good People,
Please could you tell of the difference between Pulsonix and Eagle PCB layout packages?
Eagle is mostly used by hobbyists and Pulsonix is a full professional package competing with Altium, OrCAD and PADS.
Compare the features for yourself:
Leon
Thankyou,
If Eagle is not a Professional Package, then do you know which is the cheapest of the “Professional Packages”?
The price of Altium was slashed a few months ago and PADS followed suit, probably out of desperation in both cases. Check their prices for yourself.
Pulsonix hasn’t needed to drop their prices. I run the user group and the numbers joining hasn’t changed appreciably since the recession started, so their sales must still be going well.
Leon
I would recommend Eagle to anyone starting out in PCB design. This is the path I would take (I’m on Eagle Professional right now).
Raw beginner: Eagle freeware non-profit version
Some experience, making profit: Eagle Light
Need more space/layers: Eagle Standard or Professional OR Easy-PC
Designing something like a PC motherboard: Orcad or Pulsonix
There is no need to spend a lot of money until you are comfortable with PCB design and need more space. It will be years before you gain enough experience to require PCB software that costs as much as a decent used car.
what can Orcad, or Pulsonix, or … do that eagle cant, that is worth that much money?
I have only used eagle( :oops: ), but it seems that once you get used to the backwards UI, eagle is tight.
You’ve got it, I think. I’m not a real Orcad user, just occasional use and exposure to other engineers using it. My designs are relatively simple and I don’t have to work on them 8 hours a day, so Eagle is the right combination of features and price.
Don’t worry about it. It’s time to buy Orcad when you know it will help do your job faster. If you don’t know, and it’s not a job, then you can just use Eagle.
SpinDrah:
what can Orcad, or Pulsonix, or … do that eagle cant, that is worth that much money?
Pulsonix has an excellent autorouter, track following, dual-screen support, hierarchical schematics, FPGA support, RF design features, matched line pairs, a very large library, chip-on-board capability, full ECO, rules by area, multiple PCB pin mapping, wizards, etc. etc. The footprint wizard can even rotate BGA breakouts by quadrant (that was my idea).
Here is the brochure:
http://www.pulsonix.com/downloads/datas … ochure.pdf
Starting price is only 2x that of Eagle.
Leon
I personally like Diptrace. I purchased the software 2 years ago, and just updated to the newest version.
It has a nice interface, and is getting better all the time.
Most people just don’t need all the power Pulsonix offers. I’m not knocking the product, I just think it is overkill for what I design.
I studied a bunch of software before I decided on a software. I weighed all the options and drawbacks.
For me the choice was easy…I settled on Diptrace, and haven’t had a regret.
James L
leon_heller:
Easy-PC, from the same company as Pulsonix, is a simpler product:Leon
I agree Leon, but I didn’t see that one when comparing CAD packages. Diptrace came out on top of my comparisons when I did them. There were others in that comparison, but numberone wasn’t one of the items to compare with.
James L
Easy-PC is very good, I used it for about 20 years.
Leon
Leon,
Thankyou for your help,
Starting price is only 2x that of Eagle.
…are you sure about this? The “16 Layers, unlimited nodes and 1mx1m” version of Eagle is just s few hundred pounds.
I thought Pulsonix was several thousand pounds.
(by the way, i just need Schem capture and PCB Layout, -no simulation)
Price Annual Maintenance
With AutoRoute
Pulsonix Unlimited Pins/ Unlimited Power Layers & AutoRouting Layers €6250 €781
Pulsonix 2000 pin / Unlimited Power Layers & AutoRouting Layers €3950 €494
Without AutoRoute
Pulsonix Unlimited Pins / Unlimited Power Layers & Manual Routing Layers €4495 €562
Pulsonix 2000 pin / Unlimited Power Layers & Manual Routing Layers €2538 €317
Pulsonix 1000 pin / Unlimited Power Layers & Manual Routing Layers €1813 €227
Cost Options
High Speed Design €1442 €180
Pulsonix Database Corporate Connection (enabler & one client) €2425 €303
Pulsonix Database Corporate Connection Client only €515 €64
Pulsonix Product Life Management (enabler & one client) €5500 €688
Pulsonix Product Life Management Client only €485 €61
Embedded Components €1297 €162
Pulsonix Chip Packaging Toolkit €2748 €412
Cadence Specctra Interface €457 €57
Pulsonix Spice as PCB add-on €2275 €284
Pulsonix Spice as standalone (inc Schematics) €2762 €345
Pulsonix Schematics only €544 €82
Eagle Professional costs $1494 = €1017
Leon
If you’re a hobbyist, like me, one of the advantages Eagle and DipTrace has over Pulsonix and the others is the availability of a “non-commercial” license.
You can buy a non-commercial license for DipTrace for $125 that allows up to four layers and 1000 pins. A similar license for Eagle gives you four signal layers and a 160x100mm routing area.
As far as I know, the other packages (Pulsonix, Altium, etc.) don’t offer this sort of license. That being the case, even though they may be better than Eagle or DipTrace in various ways, most hobbyists just can’t justify the cost.
Packages like Pulsonix and Altium are overkill for most hobbyists. Easy-PC is produced by the same company as Pulsonix, and is intended for the hobbyist, educational, and low-end professional markets:
Leon
I’m sticking with eagle because it has more people like me using it than any other package. That means I can get tons of help, tutorials, plug-ins, ect.
The fact that sparkfun and adafruit are using it professionally, and I’m no where near the size of them, make me know that it will be a while till I out grow it.
Another plus for Eagle is the Sparkfun component library. I’ve found that DipTrace can read this library if it’s been exported from Eagle as an SCR file.
I tried Easy-PC and didn’t like it. I found it harder to use than either Eagle or (especially) DipTrace and the library support (both that included with the program and available on the Internet) to be lacking. At $477 for the 1000 pin version, it’s almost four times as expensive as the non-commercial versions of Eagle and DipTrace.
I'd suggest that SFE uses it because that's what their target market uses - and thus that makes the most sense. As for Adafruit - I dunno if one person really counts for, well, much.george graves:
I’m sticking with eagle because it has more people like me using it than any other package. That means I can get tons of help, tutorials, plug-ins, ect.The fact that sparkfun and adafruit are using it professionally, and I’m no where near the size of them, make me know that it will be a while till I out grow it.
Adafruit is a 2 person company. You were only off by %100. 
And you know what? They’re way bigger than I am. Any 2 person company being run in the middle of down town New York with their own pick-n-place machine is ‘big’ in my book.
Maybe my book isn’t extensive enough.
*Brian