Yeah, that would be great. We currently don't compile down to spice but we hope to get there one day.
251 karma · joined March 25, 2019
Best way to support us right now is to try the project and give feedback on where you'd like to see this going. The project is open source so feel free to raise issues or contribute as well :)
I think a viewer would be nice ultimately. But we haven't exactly figured out how the solution might look like. ideally something that allows you to create datasheet-like snapshots of part of your design?
What we discovered is that:
- making a visual viewer is a non trivial endeavor. It takes a lot of time but the value add is marginal for an average viewer. - people tend to spend a lot of time making the viewer look good instead of improving the circuit
We think that in the long run, a viewer could be awesome to inspect what is going on or get a general understanding of the circuit. But it’ll be difficult to justify the time spent on it early on in the project.
For the autolayout part, one thing we realized is that it’s very hard for a computer to do a good job at it when there is a lot of implicit requirements that are not baked into the schematics. We are hoping that by capturing those through code, auto layout can be improved.
On the design check, we aren’t doing a lot there for the moment but the comment above also applies: if you have clear requirements in the code, it becomes easier to test if the solution fits those requirement.
Have a look at packages.atopile.io. We have a package with power supplies that you can just add to your board with
ato install regulators
We did use skidl for a little while as we were figuring things out (see a project here: https://gitlab.atopile.io/pew-pew-and-friends/sizzle-sack). But we later ended up moving away from it towards ato for mainly two reasons:
- Baking a description of a circuit into python describes how to obtain the circuit, but doesn't really describe what the circuit is. Skidl projects quickly become hard to read. The user is also not guided towards writing code that compiles since you need to deal with all the complexity of Python as well as the circuit itself. - Contributing to the project and adding features was non trivial
On the language side there are additional features we would like to work on like traits and types (types would include diff pairs and impedance).
Really love that. My dad gave me a piece of wood with some basic components like LEDs, motors, resistors and light bulbs and a battery that I could connect those to and understand how they worked. Glad to see you are doing something similar :)
We do have a couple videos and certainly plan to make more: - Get started guide: https://youtu.be/7aeZLlA_VYA - ESP32 module: https://youtu.be/eMWRwZOajdQ - Logic gates kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSeDv3QqRc0
We are also hoping for the package registry to become a place where you can get access to pre-designed modules to put together into a circuit: https://packages.atopile.io
Feel free to reach out per email or discord if you need help setting things up!
The open source aspect was really important to us. We are hoping that ato modules can become a convenient language for the community to share modules with each other, in a similar fashion to python and pypi.
Having an open code base also makes it more convenient for our users to chain tools together. This is currently hard to achieve with the existing close source standards we are dealing with in hardware.
ato is also a markup language (like markdown or latex) more than an actual programming language. We think this makes it more readable and helps guide the user writing code that compiles.