51–60 of 89 posts
If you live in Brazil (or is willing to come), and want to contribute to Kicad, São Paulo will host a Kicad hackaton as part of an Open Hardware Summit: http://www.e-hal.org.br/ (english version: http://www.e-hal.org.br/en ) Javier Serrano, the author of this post, will be there, as will Thomas and Maciej, two Kicad developers from CERN. The Kicad Hackaton will not be the only activity, there are lots of open hardwar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our conclusion was that for hobby projects and very simple professional PCBs, KiCad is a great tool, but it's just not enough for even slightly demanding projects (and I'm not even talking about high-frequency design, EMI analysis, and multi-person projects). You are entitled to your opinion, and surely there are more advanced tools, but lots of people do high-frequency design using Kicad. HackRF, from Michael Ossm…
I'm not sure I'd hold up Eagle high as a bar to beat.
We added KiCad support for our libraries on SnapEDA about a year ago, and now it's the 4th most popular tool on there with about 10% using it (after Altium, Eagle, and OrCAD/Allegro). When we talk to KiCad users, many are startups. However, I recently spoke with an engineer at a major defense contractor who uses Mentor Expedition at work and KiCad outside of his job. This is a sophisticated engineer who has chosen KiCad over the many free options available in the market. I had the same experience with another engineer at a medical device company using Allegro at work, and KiCad on the side. KiCad may not be as fully featured as the others, but it's being chosen as the next best alternative to these high-cost tools.
I agree that the UX is very quirky but EDA tools in general (other than Altium) traditionally have quirky interfaces.
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…
EDA tools are terrible across the board; I wonder why that is the case.
> 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)…
> Our conclusion was that for hobby projects and very simple professional PCBs, KiCad is a great tool, but it's just not enough for even slightly demanding projects (and I'm not even talking about high-frequency design, EMI analysis, and multi-person projects). You are entitled to your opinion, and surely there are more advanced tools, but lots of people do high-frequency design using Kicad. HackRF, from Michael Ossm…
> 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)…
Yes, there are bugs and annoyances. But not enough to shell out 6kEUR or so for the next step up in EDA tools (which would be Altium Designer, and I'm not even mentioning the maintenance fees, just the initial payment). For our business it simply doesn't make sense to spend that money given how well KiCad does its job.
Going into details — I only use the OpenGL mode, ever (because of the push&shove router). These are the things I would like fixed/improved:
— copper plane handling: copper planes from different nets do not avoid each other, which should be considered a bug,
— push&shove router will happily push around my carefully placed differential pairs, breaking their alignment, and NOT TELL ME ABOUT IT (the last part is the worst),
— DRC doesn't check diff pairs,
— I'd like to see easier via stitching.
The rest are inconveniences, which every CAD package has.
Also, most of this discussion focuses on PCB design. It is worth mentioning that the schematic drawing is pretty well done, and the resulting schematics look good. Also, the idea of associating footprints separately from schematic symbols is a very good one and lets me reuse footprints better.
Overall, I found KiCad to be perfectly suitable for nearly all hobby projects, and very capable for professional work, although with some caveats, and not for everything out there. I think I would not try to use it to route high-speed boards with more than 6 layers.
Let's also look at this from a different perspective: these days, as a hobbyist, I can simply start DOING electronics and easily get to 4-layer controlled impedance designs. Given the wonderful chips that are available these days and the availability of services like OSHpark and OSHstencils, this means you can really do impressive stuff, without spending anything on EDA tools. The upfront start-up cost is zero. This is fantastic and is a great achievement of the KiCad team. I am very grateful for that.
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)
In my opinion, KiCad is already better than EAGLE even not taking the price into account.
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.
> 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)…
I also did some review of many EDA tools. Sadly, KiCad is absolutely the worst I've tried in terms of UX. I guess many's favorites are Altium Designer. I just hope there is one Open Source solution that is similar to Alitum Designer. What they charge is restricting innovation from happening.
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 curren…
That's one nice about (tube) guitar amplifiers: max current is at the power supply pin, about 72ma, despite transferring 27w or so. So your voltages are pretty high , but your traces can be pretty thin. The big thing is leaving plenty of space to prevent arcs.