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

Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

techexplorations.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 97 posts

Re: Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

#41

Post by kuon »

m0zg wrote: post #30

Two features I miss: 1. Ability to produce several PCB layouts from the same schematic (e.g. right-to-left and left-to-right, I needed this a couple of times to accommodate different chassis) 2. Ability to have "outboard" circuit fragments (i.e. a set of panel mounted pots interconnected with wires, or a sub-board that's logically a part of the same circuit). Neither of which seems to be there, unless the review forg…

I agree, but the new S-Expr based format means it is way easier to manipulate the files, and maybe we can see third party solutions to fill this gap (at least for now).

Re: Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

#42

Post by romwell »

xondono wrote: post #3
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

This should be a good release, although this particular article could probably be edited down to 50% of its size without losing any information :-). One of the things that KiCAD is doing to making a legitimate open framework for eCAD design. Not surprisingly, back in the 80's when the "CAD Framework Initiative" started up and everyone was going to be able to mix and match CAD components a bunch of CAD vendors got sca…

You’re seeing too much conspiracies. CAD is hard, and it’s very hard to displace the incumbents, for the same reason that is hard to change programming languages, people have too much tied up in the old option. Most of the free/open source alternatives were built by part providers (Mouser, Farnell,..). The objective was clear, if your CAD has direct links to your site, this will probably make you the default provider…

>You’re seeing too much conspiracies

Nah fam, I'm seeing my favorite tools like Netfabb disappear and become subscription-only parts of the Autodesk ecosystem.

CAD is not just EDA, or the niche that KiCAD occupies.

Re: Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

#43

Post by contingencies »

amelius wrote: post #25
contingencies wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two are linked. If you structure schematics suitably, you can deduplicate layout (component placement). Another tip is to have two large screens so you can simultaneously navigate both layout and schematic. When you click a component in either, the other is highlighted. This can be a big help during layout. Finally, be aware of right click | Select | Items in same hierarchical sheet .

Thanks for the tip. I was avoiding hierarchical schematics because my version of KiCAD doesn't seem to implement the concept very well. I often ended up with strange inconsistencies, so I gave up. I suppose this is better in newer KiCAD versions (?) How I do placement now: deleting part of my schematics, then copying the remaining components to the PCB layout, then undoing to get my schematics back, delete another pa…

5.1.x works fine, 5.99 is surely improved. Delete workflow unnecessary once you adopt the sheet-orientation. Also improves re-use, though you have to carefully manage .sch version/variant evolution outside of KiCad. Had an awesome scroll-wheel Wacom ~2010 and have sorely missed it since. You can emulate it with touch but it's not as precise. Rocker-switches for zoom in/out or mapping on-tablet buttons are another option.

Re: Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

#45

Post by mastax »

ilaksh wrote: post #44

Is there a tool that can simulate some types of Kicad outputs? I mean something like do a PCB design for a simple circuit and then "run" or debug it in some way.

For analog electrical simulation there's SPICE. Kicad has a spice tool built in, but I haven't used it. It has some improvements in Kicad 6. I use LTSpice.

For digital or systems simulation there's Renode. You have to recreate the system in Renode,there's no Kicad integration.

Re: Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

#46

Post by m0zg »

formerly_proven wrote: post #35
m0zg wrote: post #30

Two features I miss: 1. Ability to produce several PCB layouts from the same schematic (e.g. right-to-left and left-to-right, I needed this a couple of times to accommodate different chassis) 2. Ability to have "outboard" circuit fragments (i.e. a set of panel mounted pots interconnected with wires, or a sub-board that's logically a part of the same circuit). Neither of which seems to be there, unless the review forg…

2.) is there for individual components (prefix reference with #), but not for schematics. It would be pretty neat though if you could use hierarchical sheets for whole-system design that way, though. Note that you can have multiple PCBs in one PCB file. Kicad doesn't really care.

It's less useful for individual components - I can already represent those with pads without affecting readability of the schematic too much. But I sometimes would like to carve out a chunk of stuff onto a separate board, and connect it with, say, a ribbon cable, yet keep it on the same schematic sheet, or at least within the same project. That is not doable in KiCAD 5 at least.

Re: Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

#47

Post by jpm_sd »

amelius wrote: post #16

Not to distract from the topic, but I was just wondering: how is HorizonEDA doing these days? Can KiCAD learn from this project? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23062174

Still in active development. I still haven't gotten around to trying it, shame on me. Maybe I'll wait for Version H:

"What’s next For quite some time now, people have been asking for hierarchical schematics. About equally as long, I’ve been thinking off-and-on about how to best go about implementing it. Once I made up my mind, I went ahead and implemented it over the course of about a month.

Even though the implementation is mostly done by now, I decided to not include it into this release so it receives some more testing by a wider audience. Apart from that, this results in version “H” bringing support for hierarchical schematics."

https://blog.horizon-eda.org/progress/2021/09/06/progress-20...

Re: Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

#48

Post by mhb »

xondono wrote: post #3
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

This should be a good release, although this particular article could probably be edited down to 50% of its size without losing any information :-). One of the things that KiCAD is doing to making a legitimate open framework for eCAD design. Not surprisingly, back in the 80's when the "CAD Framework Initiative" started up and everyone was going to be able to mix and match CAD components a bunch of CAD vendors got sca…

You’re seeing too much conspiracies. CAD is hard, and it’s very hard to displace the incumbents, for the same reason that is hard to change programming languages, people have too much tied up in the old option. Most of the free/open source alternatives were built by part providers (Mouser, Farnell,..). The objective was clear, if your CAD has direct links to your site, this will probably make you the default provider…

> it’s very hard to displace the incumbents

I don't know how this fits into the narrative, but Protel, which started as an affordable, very good option continued to improve and is now Altium.

Re: Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool

#49

Post by gaze »

Animats wrote: post #4

I was a KiCAD user until they dropped support for the auto-router. They apparently had some dispute with the developer of the auto-router, and took out auto-router integration. (Yeah, there's some hack to make it still work, maybe.) I have an old board I'd like to revise slightly, but it's too much work and risk to convert to the new "interactive" (i.e. manual) routing system.

You shouldn’t use autorouters at all. They have essentially no reasonable use.
Post reply on HN