First, all of my design experience is in EagleCAD, so there is some vendor lock-in. If Altium had been available at a price I could afford when I was first starting work on electronics, it could have gone differently for sure. Additionally, when I was first getting into circuit board design (2004 or so) the people I knew using Altium constantly complained about how poorly it worked.

Mostly, I haven't run into a problem I couldn't solve with EagleCAD other than this MCAD/ECAD interoperability stuff. And I can live without that additional feature which makes it a luxury upgrade. On the other hand, without SolidWorks, I seriously doubt I could produce mechanical designs to send to machine shops for manufacturing.

That all said, I already have Solidworks available because my roomate is a professional mechanical designer. It's also readily available at the local hackerspace computer lab. I'd actually love to try Altium, and if my company ever makes enough money to justify it I would not hesitate to consider it. I'd be very excited to see what I'm missing actually!

There was a post on the EEVBlog recently about how Altium is probably going to introduce a hobbyist/hopefully free version of their software.

I've seen some videos of Altium and know PCB designers who swear by it. Seems like very good stuff and I'd be excited for something available to me: I am not a professional and so couldn't reasonably buy it at the current price.

> That all said, I already have Solidworks available because my roomate is a professional mechanical designer. It's also readily available at the local hackerspace computer lab.

Is that...legal? I mean, sounds like you're happy to use solidworks for your commercial endeavors as long as you don't actually have to pay for it?

To the best of my knowledge. It's not an educational version, and only one license is in use at any time. If I didn't have access to a commercially licensed version, I wouldn't use it anymore.