convincing an ECE student to make the switch

[alfiesy]

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of the Mac (Salling Clicker, iLife suite, MS Office v.X for Mac, OS X being built on the Unix platform etc.) to an ECE student from DLSU who's currently looking around for a notebook computer to purchase. His dilemma: are there any programs written for the Mac to design PCB (printed circuit board), and CAD programs that are compatible with Autocad for Windows? He's looking for a program similar to Matlab (NOT Mathlab) which ECE students are using.

Short of installing Virtual PC for Mac (which would obviously slow down the system significantly, are there good alternative programs that would also be compatible to their Windows counterpart?

Would appreciate any of your assistance in helping him be my 12th switcher.

Alfie

[weremermaid]

What's ECE?

Cherrie

[dBAGZiq]

ECE, Electronics and Communications Engineer

I am an ECE grad of Mapua...cannot contribute to this though since now i'm in the creative field

[dude_funk]

Tempted as I am to "evangelize" as much people as I can to convert to a Mac, this is probably one case wherein I would advise against switching to a Mac.

He will be an "island". While all of his classmates are using the same programs and files types (especially since the application he needs is relatively "exotic&quot. Being a BS-ECE student is difficult enough. I don't think it is worth the hassle to give an additional burden to your friend with platform migration and digging up alternative software at this point.

Also, I don't think programming Turbo C and Turbo Pascal specifically for Mac OS is being offered in DLSU computer programming subjects.


Regards,
Christian
"ECE# 12161"

[joel]

I agree with Christian. We can't win them all, Alfie.

[chinggay]

You can't get autocad for Macs (which really sucks)... I think the program Mac people use is Vectorworks or something like that... unfortunately, Autocad's still the major program that engineering and arki people use. Oh well.

[caloysam]

Glad to see that the issue isn't being forced Good calls peeps

[S13]

well, not all engineers have to put up with a lesser OS just so they could do their work. or else the IEEE Spectrum (the monthly magazine of the world's premiere organization of electrical and electronic engineers) would have no place for full-spread ads for G5s and Xserves, which they do, and on the first page, too.

i'm an electrical engineer. i design control circuits using a variety of microcontrollers and microprocessors. and i use a mac.

i use MI-SUGAR for designing and testing circuits. it's a front end for SPICE. any ECE student will find it useful. and the best thing about it? it's freeware.

and for designing PCBs, i use Osmond PCB. it's still in beta but i've already used it and i was able to export proper gerber files that worked with our PCB etching machine.

there's also PCBWarrior which is also in beta but i haven't tried it yet, so i can't comment on it.

i use Matlab on a daily basis and i also have it installed on my Powerbook. the Mac version needs the X11.app installed though, 'coz it's basically a port of of the UNIX version. not all toolboxes work with it so i have to advise him to check the Mathworks site first if he's using any of the advanced toolboxes.

CAD for Macs? there's VectorWorks, of course.