61–70 of 105 posts
Having tried Eagle and KiCad I am enthusiastic about any new free PCB design package, as it offers up the hope of a usable PCB design package. Eagle and KiCad are both UI disaster areas that make GIMP look usable.
Any chance of macOS support?
Would love to see more features supporting RF. Obviously the dream would be a 2D or 2.1D mesh/simulate built in, but would settle for less. An easy starting point is better import/export of layouts. Designing an antenna in my RF-specific CAD suite is great, but when I actually have to build the thing, all I get is DXFs. Converting DXF to gerbers is a mess in KiCAD. Same goes if I want to reverse the pipe and simulate…
Author here, ask me anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Electrical engineers are willing to put up with so much more it seems. In general, IMHO. EAGLE, a golden-standard proprietary EDA tool, while still being quite a bit ahead of KiCad on the UX front, features no fewer pitfalls and completely unintuitive controls.
YMMV. I started learning on Eagle and switched to Kicad. It's correct that library handling and pcbnew/eeschema interaction is a little weird, but just for laying out things I always found Eagle's user interface to be obtuse and idiosyncratic, whereas Kicad was quite natural in comparison.
I've heard the KiCAD people are working towards this goal. If they pull it off, it'll be a game-changer. I'm definitely rooting for them.
The PCB EDA space really needs some competition. Kicad is really getting there, it "just" needs some UI improvements (Automation of the Schematic->Netlist->pcbnew flow would be nice) and also some of the big boy features like signal integrity and heat etc. Altium is probably the only clean PCB experience at the moment, and even that sits at 10% CPU on my machine with an empty schematic and no PCB open. The more esote…
The concept of having split tools for schematic and pcb just doesn’t cut it any more. Nowadays most companies have transitioned or are transitioning to do layout inhouse, because modern products are so integrated that the “old ways”, doing sch inhouse and sending it to a company for layout has become very cumbersome.
IMO one of the key things for any new EDA package is making a wise choice on how to store their files. Being able to script stuff that works on your files is becoming a necessity, and packages like Altium can’t compete with that easily because they use binary files for the most important (sch and pcb). For me at least, storing info as textfiles is a must to consider a switch, because the biggest issue with Altium is how bad it interacts with tools like git.
Would love to see more features supporting RF. Obviously the dream would be a 2D or 2.1D mesh/simulate built in, but would settle for less. An easy starting point is better import/export of layouts. Designing an antenna in my RF-specific CAD suite is great, but when I actually have to build the thing, all I get is DXFs. Converting DXF to gerbers is a mess in KiCAD. Same goes if I want to reverse the pipe and simulate…
Ok but I think this really should be a separate application. Let's stick with the Unix philosophy and have many tools that do one task well.
Any chance of macOS support?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Electrical engineers are willing to put up with so much more it seems. In general, IMHO. EAGLE, a golden-standard proprietary EDA tool, while still being quite a bit ahead of KiCad on the UX front, features no fewer pitfalls and completely unintuitive controls.
YMMV. I started learning on Eagle and switched to Kicad. It's correct that library handling and pcbnew/eeschema interaction is a little weird, but just for laying out things I always found Eagle's user interface to be obtuse and idiosyncratic, whereas Kicad was quite natural in comparison.
Describing KiCAD’s UI as “quite natural” could only be true with the “in comparison” qualifier, IMO.
As someone who's pretty naive about EDA software, how does this compare to KiCad or Eagle?