10 ms·

KiCad: A commitment to freedom

223 points by cheiVia0 10y ago

carriger99 10y ago
Fantastic initiative. It's amazing how much CERN has contributed back to society over the years...
curiousgal 10y ago
Honest question that might come off as stupid but, doesn't CERN have a huge budget? I imagine supporting this project can be a reasonable budget entry, why are they asking for donations?
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  The CERN budget is split over multiple projects. Also, budget + donations > budget. Lastly, by opening this up for contributions more people can feel part of the push for improvements to KiCad.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Not really. It might seen huge from the outside, but what each department gets is very different from those numbers. CERN has the same issues as any research institution. When I was there it was common to say that it felt just like being at the university without the lectures and exams part.
- _pferreir_ 10y ago
  CERN's budget is ~1B USD, which is 5% of NASA's, 25% of ESA's. And I won't even get started with Silicon Valley big corps. Considering you have to pay for an electricity bill equivalent to 1/3 of Geneva and the salaries of >3000 people in one of Europe's most expensive urban areas, I wouldn't say there's a lot of money left to invest in pretty much anything. Source: * https://press.cern/facts-and-figures/budget-overview https://press.cern/facts-and-figures/budget-overview * https://home.cern/about/engineering/powering-cern https://home.cern/about/engineering/powering-cern
adwn 10y ago
> 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), the gradual learning curve, and the plain-text project files. Plus, we're big fans of OSS. But KiCad has a lot of conceptual baggage: The way tracks, vias and copper zones are handled requires work-arounds and band-aids even for routine tasks (this has been known for two years at least), with not simple fix in sight. The PCB editor has three display modes: Legacy, OpenGL, and Cairo, with different features (unrelated to graphical representation) available in different modes, so you have to switch between them from time to time (this also hints at a lack of separation between graphics and program logic). There's a bug that prevents laying tracks closer than 0.2mm to each other (only in OpenGL mode – Legacy mode doesn't care). The "Clean-up tracks and vias" function deleted some definitely non-redundant tracks, which I only noticed thanks to the DRC (though a DRC cannot and will not catch everything). 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). The developers seem to prefer working on interesting new features like the push-and-shove router, instead of fixing the basics. Which is fine – it's an open-source project and they're entitled to work on whatever they feel like. But unfortunately, this is not how you get to a "mature tool". I wish them all the best, and we'll take a look at KiCad again from time to time. Preemptive reply to "why don't you contribute to it?": We thought about donating to the project, but the amount of money we spend on professional EDA tools per year would only buy us about 10 day of KiCad developer time (or in-house developer time) – by far not enough to fix all show-stoppers.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  > The developers seem to prefer working on interesting new features like the push-and-shove router, instead of fixing the basics Yeah, that's the problem with several open-source products. But the boring parts are needed a lot of times Also the usability aspects that were mentioned and several open-source projects suffer from it (and whenever someone tries to fix it is usually shunned)
deleted 10y ago
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iuguy 10y ago
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.
- aylons 10y ago
  I do PCB design, mostly in Altium, and I'll even add that some of my designs are of relatively high complexity. Saying that Kicad interface is horrendous compared with Eagle is, to say the least, disingenuous. Eagle has a terrible interface, lots of limitations, and a very strange mental model for design. Kicad is still far from perfection, and I do believe that the UX must improve. But even the best tool in this aspect - IMO, Altium - suffers from a lot of other issues.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Maybe it's because I haven't used any other packages, but I've used KiCAD and love it. I haven't found the tool itself especially hard (although there were a few Wtf moments at the start related to the different graphical modes having different capabilities), but, overall, 95% of the curve was learning the actual design principles, rather than the tool. It took me a few hours to go from never having used any PCB design programs to a simple finished board with KiCAD.
- jwr 10y ago
  I switched from Eagle to KiCad and I find the user interface to be significantly better in KiCad. I can't imagine someone switching the other way.
- Animats 10y ago
  KiCad is the StarOffice of the PCB design world. That's a good comment. There are two basic classes of UI problems with KiCAD. First, there are the ones that are just classic menu-and-button bad design. The schematic library and footprint library editors have a confusing set of menus and buttons to do what's really a simple open/close/new/save task. There are lots of discussions on forums about this. Those need a rethink of the library UI, a clear design document, and a modest amount of implementation. If that got fixed, the initial KiCAD complaint level would go way down. The second set of problems is harder. They're in the programs for graphical design. There are four of those - schematic drawing, schematic symbol design, board layout, and board footprint design. Schematic drawing isn't too bad. It has some strange bugs - there's a convention in schematics that you put a dot where wires connect at a 3 or 4 way connection. (Wires which just cross don't connect.) Most schematic drawing programs handle this automatically. KiCAD almost does, but it's possible for a connection dot to become detached from wires, or for wires to connect without a connection dot. This might result in a bad netlist, which matters. A few bug fixes there would be enough to fix up that part of the system. The schematic symbol and board footprint editors are just really clunky draw programs. They work, but lack basic features such as grouping and cut and paste. Those wouldn't be that hard to fix. Fixing that, plus the library editor UI, would help the project a lot, because KiCAD needs a bigger symbol and footprint library, and you want users to contribute those. Frustrating contributors hurts the project. The actual board layout program is the hardest problem. Others have written about this. There are some very strange features. There are three graphics modes (classic, OpenGL, and something else). Menu items which have nothing to do with display, such as component auto-placement, change with the mode. You can't automatically spread out components in OpenGL mode. The menu item just isn't there. (Not even greyed out, just gone.) There are also some functions hidden in dialogs under menus which ought to be more visible. The "Help" menu item just loads a PDF of the tutorial, which isn't too useful. All this stuff is fixable, but probably not via "hackathons". A UI design document is needed. That's always useful; when the UI design document has to explain some badly designed feature at great length, it's clear there's a problem. Write down exactly how all the schematic symbol and footprint library update functions work, and the mess will be revealed.
eb0la 10y ago
For those interested, here's an interesting open hardware@cern from javier serrano, the head of development for kikad in cern. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/goshcommunity/open-hardware-at-cern-a-quick-introduction-by-javier-serrano https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/goshcommunity/open-hardwar...
andmarios 10y ago
I visited the donation page and it costs about $500 for 1 developer to work on KiCad for 1 day. I do appreciate the transparency, but honestly I think my —small— donation would be used better in other free software projects unless I had some kind of vested interest in KiCad.
- db48x 10y ago
  $500 a day is quite inexpensive for a competent developer. Perhaps you overestimate how far your donation will go.
  - ricardobeat 10y ago
    10k/month is inexpensive? That's a SV engineer salary. With open source software you can have extremely competent developers from anywhere in the world. Someone in Brazil for example would be thrilled to be paid US$50-100/day, or even less, to work on OSS.
    - deleted 10y ago
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    - pessimizer 10y ago
      > [500/day] is inexpensive? It is, especially for someone who doesn't work every day, and has to cover their own health insurance. If you're willing to pay someone by the month or by the year and put them on the company insurance plan, I'd imagine you'd get a better rate.
    - new299 10y ago
      It's an SV engineers salary, but it's probably not an SV contractors salary. Contractors have overheads and inconsistent work, 500USD a day is reasonable. I would also assume their contractors are fully up to speed with the project, it's not reasonable to compare them to an unknown developer in Brazil.
    - kxyvr 10y ago
      Not really. As a rule of thumb, a person at a moderately lean company costs two times their salary. A person working for the government costs around three times. The rest of that money goes to overhead, benefits, and taxes. More specifically, say that $10k a month went directly to someone working at home who files their taxes as a sole-proprietor. That income puts the high end of their income in the 28% tax bracket, but most of it is in the 25% bracket. Payroll tax (FICA) will take 15.3% off the top. State income tax varies, but I live in one that's about 5%. Then, depending where you are, there's gross receipts tax, which is about 7% where I live. Add that all together, that's 52% of that money lost. We'll round that to 50%, so now we're at $5k/month, or $60k a year. Not bad, except we don't have insurance. Health insurance premiums depend on a lot of factors, but I was seeing about $500/month or $6000/year. Then, the out of pocket max was $3000, so we need to budget that number. Note premimums are not tax deductible. That brings us down to $51k. Also, we haven't saved for retirement. Reasonable companies contribute to 401k at 10%, which would be $12k for our developer. Most people should probably put in more, but that looks fine, so now we're at $39k. Yes, there's a tax deduction for a 401k or IRA, which I ignored, but it doesn't affect these numbers by a huge amount. Now, let's take the person working for the company at that salary level. Income tax still applies, but half the payroll tax goes to the company, so we're at 25+15.3/2+5=38% rounding up, or $74.4k. We still pay health insurance premiums, but the last place I worked had them at $100/month, that puts us at $73,200, or $70,200 if we cover our out of pocket max. Also, the company pays that portion of the retirement. In total, $39k vs $73.2k, or almost half. That's a steal for a developer. And, yes, this is overkill for a response, but I don't think many people realize how much money independent contractors lose to expenses and overhead. Yes, there are lifestyle perks and the potential to make more money. Most of the time, you make far, far less even though your hourly rate makes it look like you make far more. tldr; Hiring a KiCAD developer for that amount is cheap and an amazing deal if they know what they're doing.
Create 10y ago
commitment to freedom (cern.ch) For example, CERN has been an active contributor to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a CIA-funded project Ellison had worked on while formerly employed by Ampex. The strong bond between CERN and Oracle puts a powerful spin (on physics?). In September 2011, U.S. State Department Embassy cables were leaked to Wikileaks. One cable revealed that the U.S. pressured the E.U. to allow Oracle to acquire Sun. http://openlab.cern/about/industry_members http://openlab.cern/about/industry_members https://fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-technology https://fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-technology http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/nsa-linked-cisco-exploit-poses-bigger-threat-than-previously-thought/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/nsa-linked-cisco-exp...
- adwn 10y ago
  How is that related to the development of KiCad in a meaningful way?
ENadyr 10y ago
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 someone at the local hackspace or similar.
- taneq 10y ago
  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 mention that the interface conventions between parts editor, schematic editor, footprint editor, and layout editor vary significantly for no good reason.
  - adwn 10y ago
    I agree 100%. That said, have you used Orcad? When I use it, it also "feels like a bunch of similar tools were crowbarred into a box and called an application". From what I heard, the reason for that is that different tools where actually bought up and bundled together. EDA tools are terrible across the board; I wonder why that is the case.
    - taneq 10y ago
      I think the problem is that it's rare to find skilled software developers who are also skilled hardware designers (at the professional level, a lot of hobbyists do both). So you don't get much quality dogfooding going on. Either the tools are developed by hardware engineers, and the workflow is efficient but the software is slow and buggy and the UI is inconsistent, or they're developed by software engineers, and so it technically does what you need but the workflow is terrible.
dbcurtis 10y ago
gEDA the GNU EDA tools have bern around a lot longer and I use that. It is worth checking out.
- blackguardx 10y ago
  A long time ago, I used the GNU PCB tool to design a flex circuit. I ended up having to hand edit the gerber files to get the project done because it didn't support changing soldermask opening. I think they've changed it since then, but it was rough for awhile.
  - dima55 10y ago
    I've used GNU PCB and gschem extensively. While there's a definite learning curve, I've found them very usable and produced many boards with great success. Like you say, maybe you hit some issues that have since been fixed, but this is another datapoint. As for kicad, it came into existence after I was relatively proficient with gEDA, and it there never were any compelling reasons to switch.
    - dbcurtis 10y ago
      I'm pretty much in the same place. I have gEDA symbol and footprint libraries that I like, and the cost of redoing those and climbing the learning curve for KiCAD isn't justified. Many of my friends use KiCAD, and it seems both have issues, just in different places. I've looked at the KiCAD footprint library format, and it is a sad mess. Of course, gEDA's footprint library format also has limitations of probably equal measure. In any case, I've done many rigid PCBs and one flex PCB with gEDA and never had to resort to hand-editing files. That said, I have written my own footprint creation tools to get exactly what I want. That up-front cost is part of getting either KiCAD or gEDA to yield the desired results. As in many things about EDA, libraries are the speed bump that repeatedly jars your brain case.
      - blackguardx 10y ago
        This was over 10 years ago.
aylons 10y ago
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/ http://www.e-hal.org.br/ (english version: http://www.e-hal.org.br/en 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 hardware activities through the three days of summit. And lots of fun!
- dom96 10y ago
  Any similar events planned at CERN? :)
exabrial 10y ago
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.
- pdx 10y ago
  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 current handling needs of individual traces. Even something as simple as a guitar amplifier needs attention to the detail of proper component placement to minimize inductance where necessary between bypass caps and their associated IC's. DO THE WORK!
  - exabrial 10y ago
    :) Thank you for the encouragement. That's good information to know. I've got a hand wired prototype, and it seems to work ok, so my PCB is going to be similar. 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.
    - nibnib 10y ago
      You also need to allow for failure conditions. If a power tube fails as a short or low impedance, which will vaporise first: your thin tracks, or your fuse?
- yuhong 10y ago
  It is not the travelling salesman problem. I think it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steiner_tree_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steiner_tree_problem
natashabaker 10y ago
As someone who has been in the PCB industry for the past decade, it has been fascinating to watch how quickly KiCad came out of nowhere and quickly gained adoption as soon as CERN started contributing. After spending years in the software development of capture/simulation/layout tools for PCBs, I have come to see that these tools are not easy to create and maintain. Most products in the market are the product of decades of work. 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.
- TD-Linux 10y ago
  Thank you for adding KiCad! I was really excited when I saw that SnapEDA added support. Doing manual parts is always tedious in any tool, and KiCad is lacking automated generators for some of these - previously, I had been using an online PHP(?) tool to generate large pin count parts. The SnapEDA license is also OSHW compatible, so it makes it a no-brainer. I also first tried KiCad when I no longer had access to an Altium license for personal projects, and it's been pretty smooth sailing. I imagine the choice would be even more obvious for users coming from any of the other, worse tools. One other advantage is that I don't need to run a Windows VM for it. I even did a PCB design on a Novena, which I suppose made it second-generation OSHW.

223 points by cheiVia0 10y ago

Fantastic initiative. It's amazing how much CERN has contributed back to society over the years...

Honest question that might come off as stupid but, doesn't CERN have a huge budget? I imagine supporting this project can be a reasonable budget entry, why are they asking for donations?

ZenoArrow 10y ago
The CERN budget is split over multiple projects. Also, budget + donations > budget. Lastly, by opening this up for contributions more people can feel part of the push for improvements to KiCad.
pjmlp 10y ago
Not really. It might seen huge from the outside, but what each department gets is very different from those numbers. CERN has the same issues as any research institution. When I was there it was common to say that it felt just like being at the university without the lectures and exams part.
_pferreir_ 10y ago
CERN's budget is ~1B USD, which is 5% of NASA's, 25% of ESA's. And I won't even get started with Silicon Valley big corps. Considering you have to pay for an electricity bill equivalent to 1/3 of Geneva and the salaries of >3000 people in one of Europe's most expensive urban areas, I wouldn't say there's a lot of money left to invest in pretty much anything. Source: * https://press.cern/facts-and-figures/budget-overview https://press.cern/facts-and-figures/budget-overview * https://home.cern/about/engineering/powering-cern https://home.cern/about/engineering/powering-cern

adwn 10y ago

> 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), the gradual learning curve, and the plain-text project files. Plus, we're big fans of OSS. But KiCad has a lot of conceptual baggage: The way tracks, vias and copper zones are handled requires work-arounds and band-aids even for routine tasks (this has been known for two years at least), with not simple fix in sight. The PCB editor has three display modes: Legacy, OpenGL, and Cairo, with different features (unrelated to graphical representation) available in different modes, so you have to switch between them from time to time (this also hints at a lack of separation between graphics and program logic). There's a bug that prevents laying tracks closer than 0.2mm to each other (only in OpenGL mode – Legacy mode doesn't care). The "Clean-up tracks and vias" function deleted some definitely non-redundant tracks, which I only noticed thanks to the DRC (though a DRC cannot and will not catch everything). 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). The developers seem to prefer working on interesting new features like the push-and-shove router, instead of fixing the basics. Which is fine – it's an open-source project and they're entitled to work on whatever they feel like. But unfortunately, this is not how you get to a "mature tool". I wish them all the best, and we'll take a look at KiCad again from time to time. Preemptive reply to "why don't you contribute to it?": We thought about donating to the project, but the amount of money we spend on professional EDA tools per year would only buy us about 10 day of KiCad developer time (or in-house developer time) – by far not enough to fix all show-stoppers.

raverbashing 10y ago
> The developers seem to prefer working on interesting new features like the push-and-shove router, instead of fixing the basics Yeah, that's the problem with several open-source products. But the boring parts are needed a lot of times Also the usability aspects that were mentioned and several open-source projects suffer from it (and whenever someone tries to fix it is usually shunned)

deleted 10y ago

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iuguy 10y ago

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.

aylons 10y ago
I do PCB design, mostly in Altium, and I'll even add that some of my designs are of relatively high complexity. Saying that Kicad interface is horrendous compared with Eagle is, to say the least, disingenuous. Eagle has a terrible interface, lots of limitations, and a very strange mental model for design. Kicad is still far from perfection, and I do believe that the UX must improve. But even the best tool in this aspect - IMO, Altium - suffers from a lot of other issues.
StavrosK 10y ago
Maybe it's because I haven't used any other packages, but I've used KiCAD and love it. I haven't found the tool itself especially hard (although there were a few Wtf moments at the start related to the different graphical modes having different capabilities), but, overall, 95% of the curve was learning the actual design principles, rather than the tool. It took me a few hours to go from never having used any PCB design programs to a simple finished board with KiCAD.
jwr 10y ago
I switched from Eagle to KiCad and I find the user interface to be significantly better in KiCad. I can't imagine someone switching the other way.
Animats 10y ago
KiCad is the StarOffice of the PCB design world. That's a good comment. There are two basic classes of UI problems with KiCAD. First, there are the ones that are just classic menu-and-button bad design. The schematic library and footprint library editors have a confusing set of menus and buttons to do what's really a simple open/close/new/save task. There are lots of discussions on forums about this. Those need a rethink of the library UI, a clear design document, and a modest amount of implementation. If that got fixed, the initial KiCAD complaint level would go way down. The second set of problems is harder. They're in the programs for graphical design. There are four of those - schematic drawing, schematic symbol design, board layout, and board footprint design. Schematic drawing isn't too bad. It has some strange bugs - there's a convention in schematics that you put a dot where wires connect at a 3 or 4 way connection. (Wires which just cross don't connect.) Most schematic drawing programs handle this automatically. KiCAD almost does, but it's possible for a connection dot to become detached from wires, or for wires to connect without a connection dot. This might result in a bad netlist, which matters. A few bug fixes there would be enough to fix up that part of the system. The schematic symbol and board footprint editors are just really clunky draw programs. They work, but lack basic features such as grouping and cut and paste. Those wouldn't be that hard to fix. Fixing that, plus the library editor UI, would help the project a lot, because KiCAD needs a bigger symbol and footprint library, and you want users to contribute those. Frustrating contributors hurts the project. The actual board layout program is the hardest problem. Others have written about this. There are some very strange features. There are three graphics modes (classic, OpenGL, and something else). Menu items which have nothing to do with display, such as component auto-placement, change with the mode. You can't automatically spread out components in OpenGL mode. The menu item just isn't there. (Not even greyed out, just gone.) There are also some functions hidden in dialogs under menus which ought to be more visible. The "Help" menu item just loads a PDF of the tutorial, which isn't too useful. All this stuff is fixable, but probably not via "hackathons". A UI design document is needed. That's always useful; when the UI design document has to explain some badly designed feature at great length, it's clear there's a problem. Write down exactly how all the schematic symbol and footprint library update functions work, and the mess will be revealed.

eb0la 10y ago

For those interested, here's an interesting open hardware@cern from javier serrano, the head of development for kikad in cern. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/goshcommunity/open-hardware-at-cern-a-quick-introduction-by-javier-serrano https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/goshcommunity/open-hardwar...

andmarios 10y ago

I visited the donation page and it costs about $500 for 1 developer to work on KiCad for 1 day. I do appreciate the transparency, but honestly I think my —small— donation would be used better in other free software projects unless I had some kind of vested interest in KiCad.

db48x 10y ago
$500 a day is quite inexpensive for a competent developer. Perhaps you overestimate how far your donation will go.
- ricardobeat 10y ago
  10k/month is inexpensive? That's a SV engineer salary. With open source software you can have extremely competent developers from anywhere in the world. Someone in Brazil for example would be thrilled to be paid US$50-100/day, or even less, to work on OSS.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    > [500/day] is inexpensive? It is, especially for someone who doesn't work every day, and has to cover their own health insurance. If you're willing to pay someone by the month or by the year and put them on the company insurance plan, I'd imagine you'd get a better rate.
  - new299 10y ago
    It's an SV engineers salary, but it's probably not an SV contractors salary. Contractors have overheads and inconsistent work, 500USD a day is reasonable. I would also assume their contractors are fully up to speed with the project, it's not reasonable to compare them to an unknown developer in Brazil.
  - kxyvr 10y ago
    Not really. As a rule of thumb, a person at a moderately lean company costs two times their salary. A person working for the government costs around three times. The rest of that money goes to overhead, benefits, and taxes. More specifically, say that $10k a month went directly to someone working at home who files their taxes as a sole-proprietor. That income puts the high end of their income in the 28% tax bracket, but most of it is in the 25% bracket. Payroll tax (FICA) will take 15.3% off the top. State income tax varies, but I live in one that's about 5%. Then, depending where you are, there's gross receipts tax, which is about 7% where I live. Add that all together, that's 52% of that money lost. We'll round that to 50%, so now we're at $5k/month, or $60k a year. Not bad, except we don't have insurance. Health insurance premiums depend on a lot of factors, but I was seeing about $500/month or $6000/year. Then, the out of pocket max was $3000, so we need to budget that number. Note premimums are not tax deductible. That brings us down to $51k. Also, we haven't saved for retirement. Reasonable companies contribute to 401k at 10%, which would be $12k for our developer. Most people should probably put in more, but that looks fine, so now we're at $39k. Yes, there's a tax deduction for a 401k or IRA, which I ignored, but it doesn't affect these numbers by a huge amount. Now, let's take the person working for the company at that salary level. Income tax still applies, but half the payroll tax goes to the company, so we're at 25+15.3/2+5=38% rounding up, or $74.4k. We still pay health insurance premiums, but the last place I worked had them at $100/month, that puts us at $73,200, or $70,200 if we cover our out of pocket max. Also, the company pays that portion of the retirement. In total, $39k vs $73.2k, or almost half. That's a steal for a developer. And, yes, this is overkill for a response, but I don't think many people realize how much money independent contractors lose to expenses and overhead. Yes, there are lifestyle perks and the potential to make more money. Most of the time, you make far, far less even though your hourly rate makes it look like you make far more. tldr; Hiring a KiCAD developer for that amount is cheap and an amazing deal if they know what they're doing.

Create 10y ago

commitment to freedom (cern.ch) For example, CERN has been an active contributor to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 The name Oracle comes from the code-name of a CIA-funded project Ellison had worked on while formerly employed by Ampex. The strong bond between CERN and Oracle puts a powerful spin (on physics?). In September 2011, U.S. State Department Embassy cables were leaked to Wikileaks. One cable revealed that the U.S. pressured the E.U. to allow Oracle to acquire Sun. http://openlab.cern/about/industry_members http://openlab.cern/about/industry_members https://fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-technology https://fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-technology http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/nsa-linked-cisco-exploit-poses-bigger-threat-than-previously-thought/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/nsa-linked-cisco-exp...

adwn 10y ago
How is that related to the development of KiCad in a meaningful way?

ENadyr 10y ago

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 someone at the local hackspace or similar.

taneq 10y ago
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 mention that the interface conventions between parts editor, schematic editor, footprint editor, and layout editor vary significantly for no good reason.
- adwn 10y ago
  I agree 100%. That said, have you used Orcad? When I use it, it also "feels like a bunch of similar tools were crowbarred into a box and called an application". From what I heard, the reason for that is that different tools where actually bought up and bundled together. EDA tools are terrible across the board; I wonder why that is the case.
  - taneq 10y ago
    I think the problem is that it's rare to find skilled software developers who are also skilled hardware designers (at the professional level, a lot of hobbyists do both). So you don't get much quality dogfooding going on. Either the tools are developed by hardware engineers, and the workflow is efficient but the software is slow and buggy and the UI is inconsistent, or they're developed by software engineers, and so it technically does what you need but the workflow is terrible.

dbcurtis 10y ago

gEDA the GNU EDA tools have bern around a lot longer and I use that. It is worth checking out.

blackguardx 10y ago
A long time ago, I used the GNU PCB tool to design a flex circuit. I ended up having to hand edit the gerber files to get the project done because it didn't support changing soldermask opening. I think they've changed it since then, but it was rough for awhile.
- dima55 10y ago
  I've used GNU PCB and gschem extensively. While there's a definite learning curve, I've found them very usable and produced many boards with great success. Like you say, maybe you hit some issues that have since been fixed, but this is another datapoint. As for kicad, it came into existence after I was relatively proficient with gEDA, and it there never were any compelling reasons to switch.
  - dbcurtis 10y ago
    I'm pretty much in the same place. I have gEDA symbol and footprint libraries that I like, and the cost of redoing those and climbing the learning curve for KiCAD isn't justified. Many of my friends use KiCAD, and it seems both have issues, just in different places. I've looked at the KiCAD footprint library format, and it is a sad mess. Of course, gEDA's footprint library format also has limitations of probably equal measure. In any case, I've done many rigid PCBs and one flex PCB with gEDA and never had to resort to hand-editing files. That said, I have written my own footprint creation tools to get exactly what I want. That up-front cost is part of getting either KiCAD or gEDA to yield the desired results. As in many things about EDA, libraries are the speed bump that repeatedly jars your brain case.
    - blackguardx 10y ago
      This was over 10 years ago.

aylons 10y ago

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/ http://www.e-hal.org.br/ (english version: http://www.e-hal.org.br/en 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 hardware activities through the three days of summit. And lots of fun!

dom96 10y ago
Any similar events planned at CERN? :)

exabrial 10y ago

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.

pdx 10y ago
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 current handling needs of individual traces. Even something as simple as a guitar amplifier needs attention to the detail of proper component placement to minimize inductance where necessary between bypass caps and their associated IC's. DO THE WORK!
- exabrial 10y ago
  :) Thank you for the encouragement. That's good information to know. I've got a hand wired prototype, and it seems to work ok, so my PCB is going to be similar. 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.
  - nibnib 10y ago
    You also need to allow for failure conditions. If a power tube fails as a short or low impedance, which will vaporise first: your thin tracks, or your fuse?
yuhong 10y ago
It is not the travelling salesman problem. I think it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steiner_tree_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steiner_tree_problem

natashabaker 10y ago

As someone who has been in the PCB industry for the past decade, it has been fascinating to watch how quickly KiCad came out of nowhere and quickly gained adoption as soon as CERN started contributing. After spending years in the software development of capture/simulation/layout tools for PCBs, I have come to see that these tools are not easy to create and maintain. Most products in the market are the product of decades of work. 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.

TD-Linux 10y ago
Thank you for adding KiCad! I was really excited when I saw that SnapEDA added support. Doing manual parts is always tedious in any tool, and KiCad is lacking automated generators for some of these - previously, I had been using an online PHP(?) tool to generate large pin count parts. The SnapEDA license is also OSHW compatible, so it makes it a no-brainer. I also first tried KiCad when I no longer had access to an Altium license for personal projects, and it's been pretty smooth sailing. I imagine the choice would be even more obvious for users coming from any of the other, worse tools. One other advantage is that I don't need to run a Windows VM for it. I even did a PCB design on a Novena, which I suppose made it second-generation OSHW.