Non-Goals

To limit the project’s focus, some things are explicitly out of scope.

Autorouter

Writing a good autorouter is a lot of work that’s more well spent on other aspects of the application as experience has show that an autorouter is rarely useful for small to medium-sized boards.

Simulation

Schematic design for PCBs and schematic design for SPICE-type simulation are very different as in that schematics for simulation will often simplify aspects of the real world such as replacing an ADC input with it’s equivalent circuit. On a personal side I’m perfectly happy with LTSpice in terms of user interface and SPICE core and don’t see much scope for new developments in that space.

Raytracer

Other EDA applications recently gained a custom raytracer for rendering pretty 3D visualisations of circuit boards. For horizon that’s out of scope as the OpenGL-based 3D view is pretty enough for checking for the board for issues such as forgotten solder mask and getting an idea of what it’ll look like assembled. Any more pretty visualisation is best taken care of by exporting to 3D modelling software such as blender.

On File formats

Many people complain that there’s no commonly agreed on standard format for schematics and boards in the industry. The file formats for these are application files formats, meaning that they’ll need to support each and every knob and button the application has. Adopting another application’s file format for horzion EDA would therefore result in horizon EDA being a bad clone of the other application.

JSON has been chosen as a serialization format as it directly maps to common data structures such as maps and arrays (opposed to XML) and is easily manipulated in almost every environment.

Next: Installation