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KiCad: A commitment to freedom

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41–50 of 89 posts

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#41
post #27

Have been using KiCad for PCB development for my hardware startup and overall happy with the choice. Yes, they have made questionable UX decisions in development but then I've not tried an EDA tool that got the UX right. For those considering KiCad, but struggling to do it by themselves, I suggest you either take a Udemy course to show you the user flow. Or better yet, buy some tuition (with beer or whatnot) from som…

I think "decisions" is too strong a word. The UI is heinously inconsistent, and feels like a bunch of similar tools were crowbarred into a box and called an application. It's usable once you pick a semi-coherent subset of features and then ignore the rest, but it takes a lot of trial and error to figure that out.

Available features and even hotkeys change depending on what 'rendering engine' you choose? What? Not to mention that the interface conventions between parts editor, schematic editor, footprint editor, and layout editor vary significantly for no good reason.

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#42
post #22

I visited the donation page and it costs about $500 for 1 developer to work on KiCad for 1 day. I do appreciate the transparency, but honestly I think my —small— donation would be used better in other free software projects unless I had some kind of vested interest in KiCad.

$500 a day is quite inexpensive for a competent developer. Perhaps you overestimate how far your donation will go.

Not in most of the real world outside of that crazy SF bubble.

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#43
post #4

> Today, KiCad is considered a mature tool for the design of Printed Circuit Boards, featuring some capabilities that match or exceed those of costly proprietary alternatives. Two weeks ago, we evaluated whether we ditch our current proprietary EDA tools in favor of KiCad (my company designs and builds satellite electronics). We liked the user interface (it's not good, but better than the "professional" alternatives)…

That sounds like a list of the bugs from some commercial ECAD software I've used in the past.

Anyone remember PADS2000? Die die die!

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#44
Just used KiCad to design a guitar amplifier, really happy with it.

Now I'm designing a PCB, and what's lacking is good part placing and trace routing. I feel like there should be a an algorithmic way to do what I'm doing by hand. It sort of reminds me of the traveling salesman problem.

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#45

Just used KiCad to design a guitar amplifier, really happy with it. Now I'm designing a PCB, and what's lacking is good part placing and trace routing. I feel like there should be a an algorithmic way to do what I'm doing by hand. It sort of reminds me of the traveling salesman problem.

These are called autoplace and autoroute.

They exist, but NONE of the PCB designers I have worked with, all of who have worked at multiple big name tech companies and still do, use these tools.

Do the work. Even something as simple at a guitar amplifier needs attention to detail, to route ground currents away from where they can cause noise. Even something as simple as a guitar amplifier needs attention to the current handling needs of individual traces. Even something as simple as a guitar amplifier needs attention to the detail of proper component placement to minimize inductance where necessary between bypass caps and their associated IC's. DO THE WORK!

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#46
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$500 a day is quite inexpensive for a competent developer. Perhaps you overestimate how far your donation will go.

10k/month is inexpensive? That's a SV engineer salary. With open source software you can have extremely competent developers from anywhere in the world. Someone in Brazil for example would be thrilled to be paid US$50-100/day, or even less, to work on OSS.

Not really. As a rule of thumb, a person at a moderately lean company costs two times their salary. A person working for the government costs around three times. The rest of that money goes to overhead, benefits, and taxes.

More specifically, say that $10k a month went directly to someone working at home who files their taxes as a sole-proprietor. That income puts the high end of their income in the 28% tax bracket, but most of it is in the 25% bracket. Payroll tax (FICA) will take 15.3% off the top. State income tax varies, but I live in one that's about 5%. Then, depending where you are, there's gross receipts tax, which is about 7% where I live. Add that all together, that's 52% of that money lost. We'll round that to 50%, so now we're at $5k/month, or $60k a year. Not bad, except we don't have insurance. Health insurance premiums depend on a lot of factors, but I was seeing about $500/month or $6000/year. Then, the out of pocket max was $3000, so we need to budget that number. Note premimums are not tax deductible. That brings us down to $51k. Also, we haven't saved for retirement. Reasonable companies contribute to 401k at 10%, which would be $12k for our developer. Most people should probably put in more, but that looks fine, so now we're at $39k. Yes, there's a tax deduction for a 401k or IRA, which I ignored, but it doesn't affect these numbers by a huge amount.

Now, let's take the person working for the company at that salary level. Income tax still applies, but half the payroll tax goes to the company, so we're at 25+15.3/2+5=38% rounding up, or $74.4k. We still pay health insurance premiums, but the last place I worked had them at $100/month, that puts us at $73,200, or $70,200 if we cover our out of pocket max. Also, the company pays that portion of the retirement.

In total, $39k vs $73.2k, or almost half. That's a steal for a developer.

And, yes, this is overkill for a response, but I don't think many people realize how much money independent contractors lose to expenses and overhead. Yes, there are lifestyle perks and the potential to make more money. Most of the time, you make far, far less even though your hourly rate makes it look like you make far more.

tldr; Hiring a KiCAD developer for that amount is cheap and an amazing deal if they know what they're doing.

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#47
post #11

Everyone who doesn't do PCB design will probably find this a great idea. People who design PCBs will probably wonder when KiCad is going to fix the horrific UX bugs, and go back to using Altium or Eagle in the meantime. KiCad is the StarOffice of the PCB design world. I want to use it, but I can't justify the time working around KiCad's UX issues.

Maybe it's because I haven't used any other packages, but I've used KiCAD and love it. I haven't found the tool itself especially hard (although there were a few Wtf moments at the start related to the different graphical modes having different capabilities), but, overall, 95% of the curve was learning the actual design principles, rather than the tool.

It took me a few hours to go from never having used any PCB design programs to a simple finished board with KiCAD.

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#48
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10k/month is inexpensive? That's a SV engineer salary. With open source software you can have extremely competent developers from anywhere in the world. Someone in Brazil for example would be thrilled to be paid US$50-100/day, or even less, to work on OSS.

Not really. As a rule of thumb, a person at a moderately lean company costs two times their salary. A person working for the government costs around three times. The rest of that money goes to overhead, benefits, and taxes. More specifically, say that $10k a month went directly to someone working at home who files their taxes as a sole-proprietor. That income puts the high end of their income in the 28% tax bracket,…

[deleted]

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#49

gEDA the GNU EDA tools have bern around a lot longer and I use that. It is worth checking out.

A long time ago, I used the GNU PCB tool to design a flex circuit. I ended up having to hand edit the gerber files to get the project done because it didn't support changing soldermask opening. I think they've changed it since then, but it was rough for awhile.

Re: KiCad: A commitment to freedom

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many projects across CERN do you think would use KiCad if it were somewhat knocked shape? Going OT but staying on this theme: It seems likely that public money across many governments is spent on closed source software for circuit design. Even probably across the projects in a single developed country I imagine it might be an economy to pay for the software to be modified. Such changes then being a gift to societ…

> "Academics (in the UK) is there any effort towards making free-libre software available through collaboration of different institutes?" I don't work in that field, so I can't answer your question directly, but I can pass on that EAGLE, which is probably KiCad's closest competitor, is available for free for academic institutions: https://cadsoft.io/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAGLE_(program)

I recently did a short electronics course (I made a PIC-based board from surface mount electronics! Without sneezing!), and we did the PCB design stage in EAGLE, and it was basically buggy as hell. We were recommend to keep saving in case it crashed (it did), and if bits of our design appeared to mysteriously vanish, we should change the zoom level to see if they came back, due to render bugs...

They also suggested EasyEDA:

https://easyeda.com/editor

...which is a free online PCB layout program. I played with it for about five minutes but not much more than that. It's got an autorouter but I haven't found an autoplacer tool (although EAGLE didn't have one either).

Anyone know this? Is it any good?

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