3 ms·
I concur! They are all highly complex pieces of software each with years of design cruft and their own foibles. I've yet to try any of the "heavyweight" ones li
by abrugsch 7y ago
I concur! They are all highly complex pieces of software each with years of design cruft and their own foibles. I've yet to try any of the "heavyweight" ones like Altium because I don't have a megacorp footing the bill, but certainly of The free ones they all have issues. I personally like and use kicad but agree that it still has some serious usability issues (though a LOT of progress has been made with >5.0) it has some features that i wouldn't give up for the world (push and shove routing for one) and some I despise (library management still blows) and on balance I prefer it to the restrictions of eagle (free) but for knocking up a quick board, easy eda is pretty handy to have on hand wherever I may be that I can't install the others on. it's full featured enough to not suck as much as (say) fritzing
- klingonopera 7y agoI designed a PCB with KiCad in 2014-2016, with version 4.x and then had to make another one in late 2017, and gave KiCad another spin and am absolutely mind-blown as to how awesome it has become. I even opened up my old designs from '14 and they just worked, some complaining about an old version, but it got all the footprints (lots of custom ones, too!) right and I could just pick up and continue. I'm not sure how KiCad scales up to the $10k+ EDAs, but I am thoroughly amazed at it's quality and useability, especially considering that it's FOSS.