3 ms·

Not sure about his paranoia over the crystal routing - it's an Atmega, the crystal is 16 MHz. Anyway, I think this is more of a KiCAD tutorial than a keyboard

Not sure about his paranoia over the crystal routing - it's an Atmega, the crystal is 16 MHz. Anyway, I think this is more of a KiCAD tutorial than a keyboard design tutorial (not something particularly high on my list of designs I'd like to do). I keep trying KiCAD but with a paid alternative (Altium Designer) through work it doesn't compare. The key to electronics design is the library. There are a few alternatives which are tied to vendors, like DigiKey's Schemeit. They have decent libraries of parts. I would have figured that KiCAD would too, but the last time I tried it was pretty bad. Hope that's changed.

userbinator 10y ago
The crystal routing is pretty critical (and personally, I think the layout detailed here is not optimal either) --- it's a low-amplitude, high frequency signal, and getting it marginal means the oscillator might not always start up reliably.. http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-8128-Best-Practices-for-the-PCB-Layout-of-Oscillators_ApplicationNote_AVR186.pdf http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-8128-Best-Practices-for-th...
wonko1 10y ago
It's not really changed. To be honest, I don't think it so much of an issue any more. I have a library of parts I use regularly and just design footprints for new parts. I'm my case, I doubt that Altium would have footprints for many of the parts I want to use anyway (quite often cheap connectors, switches etc). I feel like being comfortable with footprint design is an important part of the design process. That said, there are many features of Altium that look very attractive. For example the push and shove routing.
- bradfa 10y ago
  KiCad has push and shove routing, now, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that. This is a nice overview of the KiCad router: https://youtu.be/CCG4daPvuVI https://youtu.be/CCG4daPvuVI
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
pawadu 10y ago
kicad libraries are open source and maintained by the community. they are generally okay but if you don't like them feel free to contribute with better ones: https://github.com/kicad https://github.com/kicad there are also a number of third party libraries with a great number of common components. See for example this one by olimex: https://github.com/OLIMEX/KiCAD https://github.com/OLIMEX/KiCAD
kasbah 10y ago
The standard footprint libraries have improved substantially. Additionally there are quite a large number of 3rd party libraries. I have started collecting them all at: https://github.com/monostable/kicad_footprints#kicad-footprint-collection- https://github.com/monostable/kicad_footprints#kicad-footpri.... For anyone using KiCAD also check out Xess's list of third part tools: https://github.com/xesscorp/kicad-3rd-party-tools https://github.com/xesscorp/kicad-3rd-party-tools.

userbinator 10y ago

The crystal routing is pretty critical (and personally, I think the layout detailed here is not optimal either) --- it's a low-amplitude, high frequency signal, and getting it marginal means the oscillator might not always start up reliably.. http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-8128-Best-Practices-for-the-PCB-Layout-of-Oscillators_ApplicationNote_AVR186.pdf http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-8128-Best-Practices-for-th...

wonko1 10y ago

It's not really changed. To be honest, I don't think it so much of an issue any more. I have a library of parts I use regularly and just design footprints for new parts. I'm my case, I doubt that Altium would have footprints for many of the parts I want to use anyway (quite often cheap connectors, switches etc). I feel like being comfortable with footprint design is an important part of the design process. That said, there are many features of Altium that look very attractive. For example the push and shove routing.

bradfa 10y ago
KiCad has push and shove routing, now, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that. This is a nice overview of the KiCad router: https://youtu.be/CCG4daPvuVI https://youtu.be/CCG4daPvuVI
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

pawadu 10y ago

kicad libraries are open source and maintained by the community. they are generally okay but if you don't like them feel free to contribute with better ones: https://github.com/kicad https://github.com/kicad there are also a number of third party libraries with a great number of common components. See for example this one by olimex: https://github.com/OLIMEX/KiCAD https://github.com/OLIMEX/KiCAD

kasbah 10y ago

The standard footprint libraries have improved substantially. Additionally there are quite a large number of 3rd party libraries. I have started collecting them all at: https://github.com/monostable/kicad_footprints#kicad-footprint-collection- https://github.com/monostable/kicad_footprints#kicad-footpri.... For anyone using KiCAD also check out Xess's list of third part tools: https://github.com/xesscorp/kicad-3rd-party-tools https://github.com/xesscorp/kicad-3rd-party-tools.