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Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package

horizon-eda.org

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

#41

Post by atoav »

rspicer wrote: post #4
tndl wrote: post #2

As someone who's pretty naive about EDA software, how does this compare to KiCad or Eagle?

Same question -- I've been using Kicad on personal and light-duty professional projects for about 5 years (yeah, Altium is the real deal, but when you're making a small run of prototypes for a university lab, sometimes you use the tools you have). It definitely has some rough edges, but it's also got a very established ecosystem, so I feel like Horizon will have to be a massive improvement to compete.

I use horizon for more than a year now and have quite a few pcbs from it in production. What made me pick up horizon was mostly Autodesk's aquisiton of Eagle and kicads messy library concept.

Horizon misses nothing (for me) now and has a beautifully efficent UX compared to Eagle and KiCAD. Their library concept is also well thought through, so I don't have the feeling I am wasting my time when I am contributing parts.

The downsides are:

- you still have to create many parts yourself (but parts, packages, etc are json and generating them can help a lot)

- horizon supports only newer OpenGL versions, so if your machine is old it might not run

Other than that I'd take it over all the others every day (and I do).

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

#42

Post by unnouinceput »

atoav wrote: post #40
unnouinceput wrote: post #27

Downloaded, installed, got repositories, created a test project. Finally open it, new schematic, selected a resistor to put on schema. Damn thing too big, tried to zoom out, failed. Then tried to move it, failed as well. Unintuitive, not in the mood to learn its quirks so I just uninstall it.

Scroll wheel and middle mouse button, as commonly used in most software. Home button reframes the view.

In my commonly used software I click on damn things, little boxes appear on corners and I can just drag them in/out to decrease/increase the size. Or if 3D software I have 3 more lines to rotate/roll for each axis. That's my commonly used software.

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

#43

Post by atoav »

luckydata wrote: post #16
karotte wrote: post #8

Author here, ask me anything.

I installed the software in a Windows 10 VM to try it out and it fails pretty early with a message that says: Glib::Error: No GL implementation is available. Couldn't find much to help me out figure out how to fix that issue, I assume it's some missing dependency but... where do I go from here?

It runs on my native windows 10 machine

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

#44

Post by atoav »

unnouinceput wrote: post #42
atoav wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll wheel and middle mouse button, as commonly used in most software. Home button reframes the view.

In my commonly used software I click on damn things, little boxes appear on corners and I can just drag them in/out to decrease/increase the size. Or if 3D software I have 3 more lines to rotate/roll for each axis. That's my commonly used software.

I understand. In fact I even before thought that this might be a problem, so I mentioned adding buttons for scroll and pan (Blender-style) in a github issue as well, because I thought it might help users like you with onboarding.

The maintainer seemed to be open to the idea and noted it down for later. So maybe it will be there in the next release : )

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

#46

Post by theon144 »

hokumguru wrote: post #26
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…

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.

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

#47

Post by rvense »

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.

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.

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

#48

Post by lukego »

Tangent: I'm about to start learning EDA and what I really want is a data format for my designs. Something that I can write my own code to generate and manipulate as well as using standard GUI tools.

Is there any "data first" EDA package? Something more "docbook" and less "Microsoft Word"?

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

#49

Post by hthtegr »

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.

A gallery on the website of projects completed with it would probably do the trick.

Seriously pleased this project is a thing. In 2020 there isn't really an excuse to be using software with such a poor UI/UX as KiCAD

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

#50

Post by hthtegr »

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.
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