[waterheater]

For reference, I've designed ~10 PCBs of varying complexity (simple to highly complex) and done plenty of programming. I've used Eagle, KiCad, and Altium. My comments will try to push you to think about some specific points.

Looking at your demo video, it seems that atopile is less a "tool to build electronic circuit boards with code" and more a tool to perform schematic capture in code. Do you agree with that characterization?

I ask that question because you're clearly relying on the KiCad toolchain for PCB layout, which is a crucial part of the overall PCB design process but is not "PCB design" itself. Right now, KiCad is a tool for PCB design, and you are providing an alternative method of schematic capture. I think you should make sure that the description of your creation accurately reflects its capabilities.

Is anything preventing you from taking output from the existing KiCad schematic representation system and transpiling it into ato? What about transpiling from ato into the KiCad schematic representation system?

Does ato provide any focus on routing? It could be nice to state in software that I want a component or trace constrained to a specific layer on the PCB (or in the PCB, if there's internal layers). I'm assuming no, since ato appears to be purely focused on schematic capture, but I'm curious of your thoughts on this.

It could also be nice to include placement constraints in software. For example, say I have a handful of resistors which I want placed in the same relative area of a board and in an orderly row. Do you provide functionality to allow this? The general aesthetics of PCB layout might be programmatically defined with ato.

Just like Arduino took the nitty-gritty away from microcontroller programming, think about how you can take the nitty-gritty away from schematic capture. One way this could work is with a hierarchical schematic templating system. You'd need to build significant documentation to teach people how to use it, but it could vastly simplify the schematic capture process to a few lines of code by importing a template schematic class and instantiating multiple schematic objects into a project and wiring them together.

It makes sense to me that an "interface" as you define it can be imported for a given project. For example, "Bob's Interface" is the set of a +12V barrel-type power input, a USB-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a 10-pin GPIO header. Any project using "Bob's Interface" has a known set of input and output capabilities. The term "input/output complex" also gets at this idea. Is that how you think of an interface?

That's all for now. :)

[napowderly]

We have indeed started with the schematic/requirements half of the problem. My experience in industry is there can be much more direct reuse/configuration in schematic as many boards might have similar features. Layout is typically quite bespoke as it will have mechanical constraints.

That said, we are absolutely looking to take on the layout section in the near future. We are starting with some augmentations of kicad, for example we just released a layout reuse feature, where component layouts can be captured and shared along with the ato code.

I think with few exceptions defining explicit layout choices in our language will be painful and not the right path (perhaps connector positions would be an exception). We have not put a huge amount of energy into this yet, but from some initial playing around, we believe capturing all the information that a person would use to judge a quality layout will be crucial. For example, current tools do not have concepts of current/voltage and definitely not transient behavior.

To get to actually good auto-layout that doesnt suck is going to be a slog for sure.

Thanks!