Altium Develop is a platform that unifies multidisciplinary teams across engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing to support seamless co-creation. It provides real-time visibility into designs, requirements, and supply chain data, enabling contributors to work together concurrently rather than in silos.
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LabVIEW
Score 9.2 out of 10
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National Instruments headquartered in Austin offers LabVIEW, a systems engineering software platform and toolkit.
Altium 365 is fantastic for students learning about PCB design and for large team-based PCB projects. Because this product is relatively easier to use than other ECAD software and it enables collaboration, students and professional engineers would greatly benefit from having this software in their skill set. In other words, Altium 365 is great for academic and industry purposes.
Most of the time, I am using LabVIEW to develop automated controls for lab-scale and pilot-scale systems. LabVIEW is great for its graphical programming interface, which is easy to learn and understand. The program also has a lot of built-in VIs to perform different complicated I/O, data processing, controls, and graphing tasks which are extremely useful and convenient to use. My only problem with LabVIEW is how hard it is to clean up and debug the program, due to its being a graphical interface. It is hard to search for specific variables when debugging, and some of the online debugging features don't function well in real-time.
ALTIUM DESIGNER is the reference tool in the electronic circuit design sector, its use is widespread worldwide. Although there are other alternatives, some of them free do not rival ALTIUM DESIGNER in terms of features and reliability. It is also very practical to request quotes with ALTIUM DESIGNER BOM reports since all suppliers are accustomed to using the tool.
Like any complicated program, it will always need some room for improvement. For example, it would be nicer to have other shortcuts than just the numpad Asterisk as the layer shift shortcut, or easy to shift layers via other ways. Some programs use a space bar instead, or similar. It would also be nice to manipulate or make 3D items better
I use the educational Program. And so far is the best technical support. Every time that I need one or I have a question. They respond so far and with excellent advice.
OrCAD was used at our company for years before we switched over to Altium Designer. Usually, moving all projects from one software can be a pain and time-consuming. Altium Designer made it very streamline to move all projects over, including all component libraries. In addition, on the Mechanical Engineering side of things, Altium Designer has wonderful integration with SOLIDWORKS, so all parts can be 3D modeled and brought over.
We have used MatLab's data acquisition toolbox in the past which was not too bad either, especially if you prefer the text-based programming format. The only problem with that was that the library of compatible data acquisition hardware was somewhat limited and if your hardware is not from one of the more popular brands like NI there is a good possibility that you won't be able to use it with your MatLab script. LAstly, the amount of supporting material (tutorials, etc.) is very limited as it is not a very popular tool
We are able to save money by writing our own programs instead of outsourcing.
We recently bought a new force test stand and we are able to use LabVIEW to write a program that fits our needs exactly instead of making due with what came with the stand.
When our customers ask us to do data acquisition, we know that we can always make a solution.
