I looked at it. Uses a centralized database. Couldn’t see any way to export designs. Website has an explicit section on importing KiCad projects.
I had not heard about AI based pcb layout. But I asked ChatGPT to design a power converter, and it gave me a very watered down generic set of instructions. My understanding is that AI does NOT (understand). It just gives you a design that looks like other designs. I guess it might sometimes give you some workable pcb designs but other times give you some good looking garbage.
Been following them a long time. Kudos to them for coming out of Beta.
I love that this sort of thing is happening. There is so much blue sky available if we cast off some of the paper metaphors of the past (but not all of them) and adopt the programmability features of the future (but not all of them). So I’m all for more electronics as code, where it brings real benefits.
But I can’t bring myself to do CAD in the cloud. Browser apps, which are always at a disadvantage, are at their worst in CAD - speed, keyboard shortcuts, reproducibility, stability but most importantly file management. I can’t open a CAD program to discover it’s not the same program it was yesterday and re-running DRC gives different results, or wonder whether my hotkeys will invoke my browser’s incognito mode or something specific to the CAD I’m doing, or whether my ISP doing maintenance means I can’t access my part libraries. And I simply cannot take the risk of not having design files - to archive, share or edit by hand, instead trusting that they will just be there when I next log in.
So I think what Flux is doing is awesome. But collaborative editing of a schematic is just not a big enough need for me to warrant such a dramatic shift in workflow. I’d prefer to see these sorts of things as an extension to KiCad, for example. Kind of like Visual Studio Code does with its Live Share feature - most of the time is just a text editor working from local files. But when you need to you can invoke Live Share and collaborate on the same files. It’s cool, and it doesn’t require throwing out the baby with the bath water. I imagine a similar approach could be taken with code-defined electronics - even if I’m generating parts programmatically or invoking a script to generate busses, couldn’t I still use the results in KiCad and get on with my day?
Oh - was this prompted by the name “Flux.ai”? Note that’s just their fancy modern URL. Flux is a browser based EDA tool. I don’t think there’s anything substantially AI about it.
I looked, I’m back.
The advertising blurb sounds OK until you think about it all.
Why should I trust their symbols, footprints, modules?
Some symbols have footprints. Some footprints have symbols… seems like any CAD.
There seems to be an emphasis on “modules”: Is it what I need? What did it add and where and why? Have I missed an automatic addition? Seems like more work to see what the program added than to add stuff myself and can any of this shared stuff be trusted to be correct and actually work.
That’s enough typing on this subject.
I am thoroughly biased, and some of that may be over the top.
First, I simply don’t trust external parties to keep my private data private. Private data does not leave my PC period. With the cloud based stuff, you also put your balls in someone else’s vise and perpetually keep on hoping they won’t start squeezing too hard. Cloud based applications will simply not be acceptable for me. Ever more companies are forcing their customers to subscription based applications and constant monitoring via internet. I doubt that there are many people who prefer this, I assume most only grudgingly accept it because they see no alternative.
Other considerations for the cloud stuff:
- Is it even possible to download my own designs?
- Is there any migration path to another program if I need a different set of tools (Other programs tend to implement importers from KiCad
I had a look at flux, and apparently they started with USD 15M seed money. Guess what, they will have to recoup that money somehow. Their website links to youtube video’s from an early adopter: Flux - Idea to PCB in Under 15 Minutes - YouTube
Free to use, ah well, for 10 projects…
And if you support them… Which was USD 7/month, four months ago, and has now risen to USD 12 / month. So expect them to slowly increase the pressure further. It’s also labeled as “Early supporter”, and I expect this to get squeezed out completely over time, so a realistic price would be the USD 45 per month, (It was USD48 month, so it’s gone slightly down) but it’s still over USD500 per year. No thank you mam. I rather support KiCad for the potential it has, and for seeing it grow further into that potential (And KiCad is doing quite well). If I look at his video’s this “overshoot” guy is very likely being sponsored by flux, so don’t expect him to be impartial either. When I try to imagine what the support I give to others on this forum would be worth if it was done commercially, I draw a blank. I have no way to put a realistic figure on that. If someone wants to put a number on that, or what my personal support to you may be worth, then feel free to donate that amount to the KiCad project
They also have a KiCad vs Flux comparison: KiCAD vs. Flux
First, they put a heavy vote on the “sharing” stuff, and collaborating on a project. That could be important to some, but multiple people working on the same design at the same time looks more like a cage fight to me.
They claim to have An active community of Experts, but fail to mention any counterpart on KiCad’s side. You could interpret this as a vague implication they consider this KiCad forum to be run by babbling idiots. Ah well, that is what commercial companies do. They write fancy stories to give an impression they are better than the competition, without direct lying, which could be used as a counter argument by their competitors.
They write:
“When sharing KiCAD designs sometimes projects”
Uhm, well, that was KiCad V4. It’s KiCad V7 now, and from V6 onward all used footprints and schematic symbols are cached in the project itself. In KiCad V5 there was the temporary top-gap method of the [Project]-cache.lib file. (Which people unfortunately often mistakenly deleted from the project) Even in KiCad V4 I used to export all used schematic symbols and make them an explicit part of the project, but that had to be done manually.
They claim:
In KiCAD, library management, schematic editing, PCB editing, and simulation feel like completely different flows.
That is quite close to an outrageous lie. I find the Schematic and PCB editors, together with the Symbol and Footprint editors to have a quite consistent interface. It was one of the main reasons for me to start using KiCad in the first place. New features are also being merged in between the different parts of KiCad. They do have a bit of a point with the library management. That is currently not very elaborate in KiCad, but I wonder where the database driven library system will bring KiCad over a few years (Yes I know this it (currently?) not intended for “general” libraries.
But that flux program also has some good points. Sharing projects and using another project as a basis to make your own variant is easier. You are probably just a single checkbox away from making your private project public. KiCad also has built in templates, but as of yet it is apparently not much used yet. The way for “just someone” to get their own project into the shared templates is a bit difficult. KiCad also has: Made with kicad | KiCad EDA Which is an excellent showcase for KiCad, but entry to get on that list is also high. This could certainly be improved for KiCad. You can find quite a lot of open projects all over the internet, but you have to go search for them. I do like the tags they put on projects to be able to filter them quickly.
Apparently they have “sublayouts”. A feature like this has been on the wishlist for KiCad too for a few years now. KiCad is still not there yet, but to get an idea of when this might come, have a look at the difference between the last yearly donation campain, and from the year before, or on gitlab, where over 1000 issues got resolved in the last three months. I wonder, are there long term statistics about activity on this forum?
Yes, I think you’re right there.
Before one of the usual suspects decides to buy over the company for the user base. Something that cannot happen to KiCad as a user group could just fork the opensource code. KiCad actually has well structured code with plenty of unit tests built in. This makes new developers learning curve much easier.
The value of all the time that the experienced volunteers donate to this site must be worth a fortune
I have tried it and watched some of their promotional videos/webinars. It is interesting to watch a company develop a cad program in real time, especially when the features they announce are things that are available in other programs already. It’s a big deal for them, so I get it…but I’m not going to get excited about it personally.
I don’t think many people here are going to be super jazzed on paying for a service that just brings the capabilities we’re used to into the browser, but honestly crusty old engineers like me aren’t the target audience. I think they were able to raise $12M (!?!) on the promise of enterprise, bringing in new students, and adding modern features in a UI. They’re still all trying to solve the same problems that KiCad devs are though, they’re just starting from further back. They probably have fewer legacy constraints and a much narrower customer base, so that helps to speed up delivery on certain features.
This is also what my inner cynic is saying, most noticeably that it explains the $12M investment. Anyone here excited to use Upverter (that also worked with KiCad) now that it was subsumed into the Altium machine?
The design reuse aspect could be nice, but having stuff in the cloud where you can lose your at any time, for any reason? Say they get bought, or go bankrupt? No siree.
Interesting that they have chosen KiCad as a target. Seems like Altium is a much bigger pool to pull from. As an aside, my company will be testing it’s first design converted from one we did in Altium. That’s because it looked like KiCad could do the job and we could come up with a usable workflow that resembled our current workflow.
I don’t see anything about Flux.ai that talks about it’s technical capabilities in any meaningful way, so I won’t be looking any further at it.
John
Because the KiCad file format is publicly documented and when they hit a grey area, they can look at the source code to see what the file meant…
Altium, Cadstar etc import has required a lot of effort. “Borrowing” the KiCad importer code would be a licence violation.
cloud storage is a no go for many commericial companies, not regarding what kind of security for the cloud is promised. E.g. certified companies for medical products or aircraft needs to be able to retrieve the design for many years if there is any inspection in case of problems with the design. This includes not only the design data but also complete chain of tools and hardware and operating systems on what the tools run. Thats already the death of subscription models like Eagle and browser based cloud seems that twice.
Hi there! Flux founder here - happy to answer questions.
You can export all the files typically needed for manufacturing that include Gerber, NC drill file, BOM, and pick-and-place. Just use the menu on the top left drop down and select “export”. You can learn more here: https://docs.flux.ai/Introduction/walkthrough-8-manufacturing#generating-the-standard-pcb-manufacturing-files.
You can import KiCAD parts, but not projects - yet. There’s a guide on how to import and create parts in Flux here: https://docs.flux.ai/tutorials/tutorial-import-part
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But can we download the actual design files so that we could write an importer which would import a Flux design into KiCad?
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Yes you can! You can export the .flux file that should contain everything you need. It’s just a json file you can use to build an exporter or importer into whatever you want.
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