Ugh, this hurt my brain. I do Analog and mixed signal designs and the thought of trying to debug a circuit represented as code makes me want to puke. On the other hand, I really find the schematic capture process to be painful so the thought of just writing some copy paste code for creating new parts is pretty appealing. If this thing had some kind of automatic visualization generator it might be kind of fun. Not sure if I'd ditch altium for it though.
As I went through the doc I started to think how cool it would be to put some parametric design features straight into my circuit code. So you could set gain and filter frequencies to be inputs and calculate component values automatically, creating self documenting circuits. But then I saw what they did to the multiplication operator. Yuck, that's super unintuitive:
> r2, r3 = 2*r1
That's how you make two copies of whatever r1 is. But intuitively that statement says, at least to an EE it a circuits guy, that r2 and r3 are resistors with twice the resistance value of whatever r1 is. That is a real problem.
Might be nice for fpga layout design. Tying 400 pins to net names by clicking on each one is tedious and error prone. For everything else I'd really miss the graphical representation of a schematic.
I wouldn't mind using something like this to define bus connections and such, then import the netlist into my schematic editor and have it help me draw the schematic. That would be pretty useful.
I wrote a tool like this for big high-performance test boards at work, the input was a spreadsheet, and I automatically generated (visual) schematics after assigning the netlist using a constraint solver. The analog guys review and debug using the graphical schematics, their design doc, and lab tools. I started the visualization end after thinking about how tumblr packs images onto a webpage pretty well, turns out 2d and 3d shape/box packing is a rich academic field.
As I went through the doc I started to think how cool it would be to put some parametric design features straight into my circuit code. So you could set gain and filter frequencies to be inputs and calculate component values automatically, creating self documenting circuits. But then I saw what they did to the multiplication operator. Yuck, that's super unintuitive:
> r2, r3 = 2*r1
That's how you make two copies of whatever r1 is. But intuitively that statement says, at least to an EE it a circuits guy, that r2 and r3 are resistors with twice the resistance value of whatever r1 is. That is a real problem.
Might be nice for fpga layout design. Tying 400 pins to net names by clicking on each one is tedious and error prone. For everything else I'd really miss the graphical representation of a schematic.