San Mateo, Calif. (PRWEB) – 15 May, 2015 — Altium has announced an open beta program for their community-driven PCB design tool. CircuitMaker is now available worldwide to all interested electronics designers, and aims to address the unique needs of the electronics maker and hobbyist community with a free software offering. CircuitMaker is available now to download from theCircuitMaker website.
“We’re incredibly excited to see how the CircuitMaker community will grow and evolve during this open beta program,” said Ben Jordan, Product Manager at Altium. “The electronics maker community has always been characterized by a very organic and collaborative growth process, and now electronics designers of all shapes and sizes have CircuitMaker with which to voice their creativity.”
Addressing New Market Opportunities
The rising growth of the electronics maker community in recent years has created a unique niche market and need for a specialized PCB design tool. Altium has committed itself to addressing the need of this growing community with a free tool focused on open hardware and shared design resources.
The open beta testing program allows anyone to download and begin using CircuitMaker today and become part of a growing electronics design community where designs can be shared and collaborated on freely. This open beta process will also provide feedback and input to refine CircuitMaker so it can become the best free PCB design tool for electronic designers in the maker community.
Collaborative Design Possibilities
CircuitMaker will be free to anyone interested in using the software, with no limits to design capability. This free PCB design tool from Altium offers a polished and streamlined design tool for the maker community with features like:
- Comprehensive PCB design technology. Built from the foundation of existing Altium technology, all of the typical features needed for modern PCB design are built in to CircuitMaker. This includes schematic-PCB integration, interactive routing, and output generation tools.
- Advanced community collaboration. With CircuitMaker, designers have the opportunity to collaborate in a community-driven design environment, with unlimited access to contributed design and component data. This collaboratively design process is made possible by combining an advanced, cloud-based platform and an industry-standard user experience in a native application-based design environment.
- Streamlined interface. CircuitMaker is a native application, and provides a streamlined interface, allowing new and casual designers to create designs quickly. This removes the traditional, time-intensive learning curve usually required for new PCB design tools.
Availability
The CircuitMaker open beta program begins today, and is freely available worldwide to all interested electronics designers. Those interested can register now for the open beta at the CircuitMaker website and download immediately.
Altium will be in attendance at the 10th annual Maker Faire in the Bay Area on May 16 and 17th to formally announce the CircuitMaker open beta to all event participants.
About Altium
Altium Limited (ASX: ALU) is a multinational software corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, that focuses on electronics design systems for 3D PCB design and embedded system development. Altium products are found everywhere from world leading electronic design teams to the grassroots electronic design community.
With a unique range of technologies Altium helps organisations and design communities to innovate, collaborate and create connected products while remaining on-time and on-budget. Products provided are Altium Designer®, Altium Vault®, CircuitStudio®, PCBWorks®, CircuitMaker® and the TASKING® range of embedded software compilers.
Founded in 1985, Altium has offices worldwide, with US locations in San Diego and Boston, European locations in Karlsruhe, Amersfoort, Kiev and Zug and Asia-Pacific locations in Shanghai, Tokyo and Sydney. For more information, visit www.altium.com. You can also follow and engage with Altium via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
