Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

horizon-eda.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 105 posts

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#81

Post by rta5 »

theon144 wrote: post #46
hokumguru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an absolute beginner learning how to design PCBs and simple circuits for hobby projects - I have to say while KiCAD is getting there, it really still has a learning-curve of a sheer cliff. The interface and workflow seem arbitrary and unnecessary complex for what should be a relatively straightforward process. I realize this tool is far more powerful than I'll ever need but it really does feel like I'm in way over…

>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.

I still do not understand how EAGLE attained its 'golden-standard' status. Out of the cheap or OSS EDA tools (DipTrace, g-EDA, KiCAD, Eagle)* I thought it had the most difficult learning curve. My best assumption is that it is riding on historical momentum.

* Although not really in the list, last year Cadence was selling OrCAD for something like $430. Hopefully we get more < $500 USD offerings.

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#82

Post by stavros »

hthtegr wrote: post #50
hthtegr wrote: post #49

As much as I do like KiCAD, and use it professionally, the UX at times is literally a comical design-by-committee dumpster fire. I gave this a spin, and it's so refreshingly the opposite of that. My main barrier to using it for my next project is this - am I going to get 100 hours into a project then hit a brick wall and have to port back over to KiCAD. If I had some confidence around this I think it'd give it a shot…

Sorry replying to my own comment here, but this needs to be said. THANK YOU KiCAD developers. Yes it has issues but I am very grateful, comments above aside.

I'd like to pile on here and say that, for all its issues, KiCAD is an extremely valuable and important tool in the EDA space. Hobbyist PCB making at this scale simply would not be possible without it.

That said, I am very happy to see new entrants, like Horizon. I watched a presentation by the author in the 2018 FOSDEM and it looked like a great idea even back then, I'm going to try it for my next project to see how it has progressed.

Wayne Stambaugh, the KiCAD project lead, was in that presentation, and they're very much aware of the problems KiCAD has. They're working in that direction, as KiCAD 5 no longer requires you to export/import the netlist, I believe (I'm not sure because I reflexively always do it anyway).

One of the first questions they had towards the Horizon developer was "why make a new tool instead of contributing to KiCAD?", and the answer, IIRC, was "It was easier to make my own", which sounds reasonable given the amount of innovation that went into Horizon and the constraints a project as widespread as KiCAD would have, regarding backwards compatibility etc.

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#84

Post by ruslan »

mhh__ wrote: post #24

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…

A year and a half ago we abandoned using Cadence and Altium in favour of KiCAD. Extremely high cost of licensing was a reason, but not the only one. Our first steps with KiCAD were hard and tiresome, my engineers even tried to sabotage the work a couple of times. But now as we got used to KiCAD I'm pretty much happy with this decision. KiCAD's GUI needs rework, also its net naming convension is flowed (try to re-annotate the whole project an you most likely will lose your PCB design because of incompatible net names). Yet, if you understand what is going on under the hood you can work around the issues. Since we switched to KiCAD we have been able to successfully design (and test) a couple of complicated PCBs with DDR3 and 0.4mm pitch BGAs. In this regard, I would be happy to see more ppl starting open source EDA projects. A decent Gerber editing tool is a need!

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#85

Post by rta5 »

karotte wrote: post #8

Author here, ask me anything.

A few questions from an Altium user:

1. Does Horizon support an equivalent to the 'Variant Manager?' This is something that will allow variance of build outputs (different component populations, different schematic text, etc).

2. In the docs it seems to mention submitting parts to the default pool. If people submit parts to the pool are there style guides somewhere? (line widths, US vs EU resistor symbols, etc)

3. Looking at a random SMD footprint (SOT-363) it looks like the paste window is equal to the pads. Is there a way to set paste mask expansion like is done in Altium? (Automatically offset paste window from pad by some amount)

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#86

Post by ruslan »

rta5 wrote: post #81
theon144 wrote: post #46

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.

I still do not understand how EAGLE attained its 'golden-standard' status. Out of the cheap or OSS EDA tools (DipTrace, g-EDA, KiCAD, Eagle)* I thought it had the most difficult learning curve. My best assumption is that it is riding on historical momentum. * Although not really in the list, last year Cadence was selling OrCAD for something like $430. Hopefully we get more < $500 USD offerings.

I possess a license of this OrCAD, it is exremely limiting (in terms of Constrains at least). KiCAD is even more feature rich in this case, and free. :-)

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#87

Post by ruslan »

karotte wrote: post #8

Author here, ask me anything.

Great. Here's one:

When producing a placement file for a PCB, can component part numbers be exported ? Neither Cadence, nor KiCAD stores components in their PCB files, only footprints, so part numbers cannot be easily accessed.

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#88

Post by madengr »

mhh__ wrote: post #33
madengr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll never get those add-ons in a free package, as it takes institutional knowledge and full-time work to develop it, which cost $$. Cadence, Keysight, etc. provide the licenses to universities, not individual students, but they are pretty easy to get. Sounds like you need to work the channels through a professor.

Easier said than done when you're studying physics rather than EE, and during lockdown. I've got the software now, it just took a ridiculously long amount of time for them to give me a generic text file. Altium didn't work at all so I definitely didn't borrow a friends .edu email wink wink. The Keysight website doesn't actually have a list of universities in its software program so I didn't bother checking whether I…

I’ve never heard of the big vendors charging universities. They usually bend over backwards to get their software installed.

Have you tried CST?

https://www.3ds.com/products-services/simulia/products/cst-s...

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#89

Post by gh02t »

xellisx wrote: post #22
karotte wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pro Horizon: - library management that makes sense (though is a bit more complex than KiCad's) - clean and modern UI - fast-paced development (if there's a suggestion, that makes sense to me, I'll implement it) pro KiCad: - large library of parts - has been around for a long time, so for every problem you may encounter, there's likely a forum post or so that describes a solution/workaround - larger community

I wish they had git or something built into KiCad, specially to update parts and be able to find libraries, instead having to search for them online and downloading and extracting and adding to two places in the software.

They sort of do, the official KiCAD part libraries are actually hosted on Github https://kicad.github.io/. A lot of distributions kinda mess this up by distributing static snapshots, but I usually clone the Git repo and then direct KiCAD to that. The base libraries cover a ton of parts, and I then keep all my self-drawn or individually downloaded parts in a separate library.

It's still a pretty clunky workflow but it gets the job done. I really wish it was possible to have a point and click interface in the GUI for downloading individual new parts akin to a Linux package manager, but this is probably difficult to manage since there is no centralized distribution point for parts that are outside of the official libraries.

Re: Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

#90

Post by mkj »

StavrosK wrote: post #83
karotte wrote: post #8

Author here, ask me anything.

Why aren't there Linux builds? I'd love to try it out but this immediately makes it impossible for me.

There's a flatpak binary for it https://www.flathub.org/apps/details/org.horizon_eda.Horizon...
Post reply on HN