Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

• atopile

  2 1,645 9.9 Python

  Design circuit boards with code! ✨ Get software-like design reuse 🚀, validation, version control and collaboration in hardware; starting with electronics ⚡️

  

Hey HN,

We are the founders of atopile. We’re building a tool to describe electronics with code. Here is a quick demo: https://youtu.be/7-Q0XVpfW3Y

Could you imagine the pain of building an entire software product using only assembly code? That’s about how we felt designing hardware. We don’t currently have good ways to describe what we need, reuse existing designs and compile that description down to a product.

We started atopile to fix this. atopile is an open-source language and toolchain to describe circuits with code. The compiler is here: https://github.com/atopile/atopile Docs are here: https://atopile.io/getting-started/ . For a detailed deep dive designing an ESP32 module, see this video: https://youtu.be/eMWRwZOajdQ

We realized this was a problem in our previous jobs. Narayan and I (Tim) had to manually, draw and export all our electronic circuit boards. This lasted until our friend Matt, a software engineer, showed us his development workflow. All his projects were built, tested, and merged automatically via GitHub. So we asked: Can we build the same for hardware?

We observed that the ability to abstract electronics effectively hinged on using a language to describe the requirements, so we came up with the “ato” language. In ato, you can break down circuits into modules, components and interfaces. You can nest and connect those blocks with each other. Here is an example with an RP2040 microcontroller:

import RP2040Kit from "rp2040/RP2040Kit.ato"

• skidl

  12 974 7.3 Jupyter Notebook

  SKiDL is a module that extends Python with the ability to design electronic circuits.

Great question! We hope we have a few good reasons.

This iteration of the project actually came after first working with and then modifying another awesome project called SKiDL (https://github.com/devbisme/skidl).

It's based on Python - but we found that because since it's procedural, turing complete and has a rich eco-system - people use to that and there aren't standard composable ways of designing things. Instead of describing your board, you (practically) write a script that generates your board. It entangles your targets with your source-code and can make it difficult to understand the ultimate outcome of what you've written.

Additionally, since it's a potentially very long program, it was hard to write good language support around (a language server for VSCode, a schematic visualiser etc...) that were snappy, responsive and lent to examining modules as well as the whole program.

There's a few operators and first-class language features we wanted as well, like units and tolerances (3.3V +/- 100mV) that just aren't the same when embedded in a string, or class init method.

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• logic-card

  2 10 8.6 C++

By reading some code here https://github.com/Timot05/logic-card/blob/main/elec/src/log...

I wonder if with directional arrows, instead of writing "out ~ switch.in; switch.out ~ power.gnd", we could write "out ~> switch ~> power.gnd" instead?

But without distinction between in and out ports it may not be possible to check if connections are valid ones.

Anyway, this project really makes me want to learn electronics! Congrats!

• Mendel90

  4 261 1.8 OpenSCAD

  A RepRap Mendel variant using sheets for the frame instead of rods

Old issue, but annoying nonetheless. Less of a problem when outputting STL files (for printing) which only support polylines and not arcs/circles. Funnily enough, 3D printers nowadays support arcs natively in G-code, so some slicers support detecting rounded polylines and converting them back into circles or arcs.

Found a script[0] that does this for DXFs in a github issue[1].

[0]: https://github.com/nophead/Mendel90/blob/master/dxf.py

• openscad

  73 6,425 9.4 C++

  OpenSCAD - The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller

  

• spin-servo-drive

  1 35 9.4 Python

  SPIN ✨ - Servos are awesome 🤩. Spin is an open-source hardware project to make it easy and cost effective to use fully-fledged BLDC servo motors 🚀

  

Hey everyone, if you want to see a complete project, please check out the Spin Servo Drive that Narayan designed: https://github.com/atopile/spin-servo-drive

It can be a good example of how to setup an ato project.

• f4pga

  6 314 1.9 Python

  FOSS Flow For FPGA

  

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