Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

I spent several months working with Flux, and while I actually generally enjoyed the UI and web-based approach, I had to switch back to KiCAD because there were so many dealbreaking bugs in fundamental features.

The realtime collaboration was just straight up broken; as in, my collaborator would make changes that would not manifest until I refreshed. This is unacceptable.

The PCB tracing was unusable because you could not control the wires and things would appear in strange places. Forget auto-routing... I had trouble just getting it to connect wires.

I could go on at (great) length, but while I genuinely am rooting for the team behind this product, I can't recommend it until they prioritize getting the fundamentals working properly over adding new AI features.

That said, in attempting to work through these issues, I gained a healthy amount of respect for how hard it is to create a viable new entry in this domain. For whatever reason, it often seems culturally normalized to shit on Flux and I think this is toxic and unproductive.

This is one of the more measured takes I've read about our tool. I'm a product designer building Flux and I'd love to hear more about your issues. If you're interested in helping us climb that mountain faster, hit me up at brooks at flux.ai

Also, we're working fast to solve some of the issues you describe. Have you tried us recently?

Kerry was really amazing to work through issues with. He took my feedback like a champ and was able to get a number of issues addressed. I made it clear to him that I wasn't giving up on Flux, but that I had to do the responsible thing for my project and would check back in.

I transitioned my product to KiCAD in late December. I'll definitely check out how things are going when I start my next product later this year.

Kerry is the best. Take us for a spin again and let us know if you're still encountering issues!

Partnering with Ultra Librarian is simply going to make me more inclined to shit on Flux, though. And I don't even know anything about Flux.

These "library managers" like Ultra Librarian and SnapEDA are a pox upon the ecosystem. The symbols and footprints have non-open source licenses, so you nominally can't share them. They simply want to get in the middle of your design so that they can monetize you.

Damn, I am apparently woefully ignorant of this. As someone who is somehow both intimidated and fatigued of having to track down multiple assets for every item in my BOM, DigiKey's downloadables have been huge win... or so I thought?

How does the licensing issue actually manifest in a practical sense? By what mechanism(s) could this monetization occur? Is this sabre rattling or are small hardware designers actually getting bills for using premade footprints and models?

I do like the DigiKey symbols, but the quality and style is all over the place with them.

In Flux, this closed source aspect doesn't exist. Any user can fork and alter any part.

I looked into this the other day. SnapEDA says their symbols are CC licensed, though their FAQ reference some kind of license addition that tries to discourage mass redistribution—at the time I couldn’t find the actual text of this addition. Ultra Librarian did not publish any license I could locate.

Is the license CC 4.0 or one of the older flawed ones?

That part is very important when it comes to CC licenses. Make a mistake in attribution for pre-4.0 CC license and you are open to being sued by the rights holder.

Cory Doctrow has an article about the background and the industry that sprang up to make use of this. https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-c...

Hello there, this is Carlos from SnapMagic (formerly SnapEDA) writing, thanks for bringing this up. The Creative Commons License we use is CC4.0, with a Design Exception that allows for fair use of our content. For more information, please go to this link: https://support.snapmagic.com/en/articles/2957814-what-is-th...

Hi, this is Carlos from SnapMagic, thanks for sharing this. We have a CC4.0 license which allows for fair use on commercial and non-commercial manufactured designs without attribution or other license restrictions.

When sharing the exact CAD content or any derived works publicly, please make sure to provide proper attribution to the sources. The credited sources must include Snapmagic and the community author, if applicable. For more information, please check: https://support.snapmagic.com/en/articles/2957814-what-is-th...

Thanks for the clarification, and thanks for going with a permissive license.

I think the link to the Design Exception was broken previously. Also in the definition it's called the Design Exclusion, might want to fix that.

It would just be easiest if every page where you download the design has a copyable license with correct attribution, and a LICENSE file in the download bundle, just like a typical open source project. As is, the license information is kind of buried in not one but two different FAQ parts of your website.

I don't see how it's possible to beat companies like Altium that have been continually improving the sch and pcb design experience for the last 30 years.

The AI is a cool idea. Maybe as an add-on? An import? A library? Collaboration? IDK, but details like via tenting properties on layer 3 are best left to the experts.

I think it's a huge mistake for any ecosystem to be impenetrable to new players with fresh ideas.

We see this in the web browser engine space with Chromium.

That's why I find the glee with which prominent EE community types appear to condemn Flux really frustrating. Yes, Flux has big problems and a huge mountain to climb. To me, that's why we should encourage them. There are a million easier things those folks could be attempting, so shitting on them for trying to bring a new perspective is self-defeating.

As for Altium, I haven't used it because it's very expensive and tied up in a larger enterprise ecosystem. It doesn't make a ton of sense for solo or small-team designers to use a tool heavily influenced and full of tooling for use by the world's largest companies.

That's why I found Flux so compelling; my partner and I actually want to use the "Figma for electronics", if such a thing can be provided without critical bugs.

It's funny, Altium was the underdog for years. Only as they continually improved did they slowly gain market share.

The tools need to work consistently, just like the tools of a carpenter. If his hammer head keeps falling off, it's not very helpful even if it was free.

My point was that it is really difficult to make sch and pcb design easy for the end user. There are already companies that have climbed that mountain. AI is a nice differentiator, but in my opinion a startup would be better focused by working with existing tools instead of reinventing them (poorly).

Obviously startups are free to do as they wish.

Altium has only recenty started adding the features it needs to compete with Allegro and Xpedition. It's historically been oriented towards small-team efforts in the same niche as OrCAD and PADS.

The argument I see for Flux is the "FAE in a box" sorts of features for educating hobbyists and early-career design engineers while keeping them out of trouble. The person I imagine would otherwise not done a PCB at all. Someone who instead would have wired up up a bunch of prefab Arduino-type dev boards or bought small power supplies, DIN mount relays, and so on. Those features put a lot of things within the reach of technicians, panel designers, and systems integrators.

Entry into the domain is hard because EE is incredibly mature in western countries.

By that I mean most work is heavily regulated, either defense, aerospace or industrial goods that must meet safety certs. Schematic and PCB design flow are heavily impacted and you can't go all tech startup go fast and break things on it.

Anything that's mass market consumer goods these days is outsourced to a shop in Asia or even Eastern Europe to design. At that point their labor is cheap that you don't care what they use.

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