As the subject says - yesterday, Farnell (owners of Farnell, Newark and other brands), bought my favourite PCB package company for a reported 12M euros.
Just hope they don't screw it up...
Nick
nickds1
Farnell buys Cadsoft (Eagle CAD s/w)...
Author
Message
JohanEkdahl 
Any good links to news stories, press releases etc? Especially if there are any bids on what will happen to the free version of Eagle. I poked around a bit but only saw the usual marketing and upper management brou-ha-ha..
nickds1
FYI:
1. From Farnell:
http://www.element-14.com/commun...
http://www.element-14.com/commun...
2. From the news://news.cadsoft.de eagle.userchat.eng group...
From: "Klaus Schmidinger"
Subject: Re: Farnell Buys CadSoft!
Date: 24 September 2009 17:23
On 24.09.2009 16:57, James Morrison wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> For those who didn't see this in the German forums, I'll repost the
> link...
>
> http://www.electronicsweekly.com...
>
>
> I actually stumbled into Element14 last week and say that they had some
> stuff on EAGLE and that they linked to Newark (Farnell company) with pages
> listing that they were selling EAGLE. I thought that was odd.
>
> I'm not sure what this means for all of us. Interesting days ahead...
Interesting indeed - and exciting, too!
It is true, Farnell has acquired CadSoft yesterday.
But don't be alarmed, everything will continue as before.
Our German office has moved into a new building today, so
it may happen that tomorrow we can't be reached by telephone
or email for a while, since that's when the phone lines will
be switched over. We'll do our best to minimize the blackout,
of course.
Klaus Schmidinger
--
_______________________________________________________________
Klaus Schmidinger Phone: +49-8635-6989-10
CadSoft Computer GmbH Fax: +49-8635-6989-40
Hofmark 2 Email: kls@cadsoft.de
D-84568 Pleiskirchen, Germany URL: www.cadsoft.de
_______________________________________________________________
clawson 
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Does this mean we can ultimately expect all parts stocked by Farnell to be available in Eagle libs? (hope, hope)
leon_heller 
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Farnell has stocked Number One Systems Easy-PC for some years. It'll be interesting to see if they continue selling it.
Leon
bobgardner 
I dont think Adobe put out any major improvements to Audition since it was cooledit by Davy Jones. Seems like cadsoft has been pretty much a one man operation... I betcha Farnell wont do anything with it at all... just sell it as is from here on out. To get several full time maintenance programmers up to speed would turn it into another Daussault Altium DXP costing $1000s.
UNiXWHoRe The problem with these declarations is they are usually made by the selling party, and once it's sold nothing they said has any weigth anyways.
I would expect the current free version to remain available for some time, probably with less and less support, and innovations to go onto the paid version exclusively, so that they can sell it for more money. Otherwise I don't really see the point of buying a product that, while it has an established niche, has no real new market value or anything...
SalAmmoniac If the new owners do cut back on support and/or new features for the free version, it seems to me that this would be an excellent opportunity for another vendor to offer a free version of their package to fill the gap.
I know many people who started with the free version of a commercial product and then ended up buying the full version that they never would have done if there wasn't a free version available.
eskoilola I actually bought the non-profit version of Eagle - and it has been great value for the money.
Guillem Planisi 
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Location: Vilanova (Barcelona)
Steve, I had been in one adquisition, I had heard the same BS, so I can state that it tends to be BS. At least in the medium term, there will be many changes.
But Hope still remains, and it seems that Cliff has the same than me. It would be really nice to have all libraries, with Farnell's reference for all components in stock, and an script that generates the order for the BOM on line. Hope, Hope.
Anyway, used for many years to Altium, now that I work with Eagle at my job, I miss many many features when it cames to hand routing (maybe it is time to learn how to 'auto(b)rute'?). On the other side, libraries are crowded and easy to find for Eagle, and quite sparse for Altium.
leon_heller
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The Eagle autorouter is very poor!
Leon
SalAmmoniac leon_heller wrote:
The Eagle autorouter is very poor!
Who cares? I always hand-route anyway, and my "auto-router" is excellent.
barnacle
eskoilola wrote:
I actually bought the non-profit version of Eagle - and it has been great value for the money.
I have both the non-profit (Eurocard, 4 layers) and the small sales (half-eurocard, 2 layers) licence. I agree; for the money it's a damn good product - with the exception of the autorouter.
But I do this as a hobby; I'm quite happy to spend three days getting a good manual route.
nickds1
barnacle wrote:
eskoilola wrote:I actually bought the non-profit version of Eagle - and it has been great value for the money.I have both the non-profit (Eurocard, 4 layers) and the small sales (half-eurocard, 2 layers) licence. I agree; for the money it's a damn good product - with the exception of the autorouter.
But I do this as a hobby; I'm quite happy to spend three days getting a good manual route.
Hi Neil!
I have the full Professional version, and, yes, the autorouter is not that great - however, for most smallish double-sided boards, if used correctly, its not bad at all. For complicated boards I use the ELECTRA autorouter - not easy to use, but excessively fast and good!
Nick
leon_heller
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Electra is a very good autorouter. It's an option with the Pulsonix software I use.
Leon
nleahcim
leon_heller wrote:
The Eagle autorouter is very poor!Leon
Don't troll, Leon.
Guillem Planisi
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Joined: Fri. Jun 11, 2004
Posts: 2405 View posts
Location: Vilanova (Barcelona)
Eagle and Altium autorouters are very poor. And manual routing wiht Eagle is a pain in the A**, when one is used to route everything by hand with Altium. Probably others like PADS or Leon's Love (aka Pulsonix ;)) are as good, and even better, but I only can have an opinion about what I use.
I must add that don't have extensive experience with that autorouters, but the kind of boards I had routed up to now weren't exactly computer motherboards. All in all, few colleagues had done some boards with them, and the results I had seen are quite poor compared with similar designs done by myself.
I understand that there are good autorouters commonly used to design complex boards, like PC motherboards, but I also understand that these are not as simple to use as a simple 'click'. I simply can't imagine routing similar boards by hand...
leon_heller
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nleahcim wrote:
leon_heller wrote:The Eagle autorouter is very poor!Leon
Don't troll, Leon.
It is crap, as other people have said. What's wrong with mentioning the truth?
Leon
jesper 
Who cares? Only babies use autorouters.
daqq 
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Location: Slovakia, Bratislava
Quote:
I suggest you exorcise your babies.
Who cares? Only babies use autorouters.
bobgardner We think the Altium autorouter is great, because we only used the Eagle autorouter before that. In a small shop that doesnt have a pc layout guy, the autorouter is like another full time employee that doesnt take smoke breaks. You hand him the board and parts and the schematic, and he hands you a routed board ready to mail to the fab. I think the boss would name him, but he's an old gruff navy officer and doesnt have a lighthearted disposition. I'd much rather that he cuss at George The Autorouter rather than cuss at me.
bpaddock
jesper wrote:
Who cares? Only babies use autorouters.
People that must meet real world schedules use autorouters.
leon_heller
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I mostly use manual routing, but I often use the autorouter when I have lots of connections to connector pins. It saves a lot of time.
Leon
Jepael I agree - one should never use autorouters anyway so it does not matter how good an autorouter Eagle has.
barnacle
Somewhat annoyingly, I can't find three eurocards I routed by hand, which the autorouter couldn't do at all. Perhaps they're on the work machine.
geoelec I agree.The best routing is the manual routing for one layer board not autoroute with the 1 million jumpers per square inch.
peret
Bob, Altium is an Australian company, I don't think they have any connection with Dassault. That would be SolidWorks you're probably thinking of.
leon_heller
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There was an association between Dassault and Altium but it was a different Altium. Lockheed sold CADAM to IBM who renamed part of it Altium, and sold it to Dassault.