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I recently learned KiCad and did some basic boards with it. It was a breeze; didn't run into any crashes, bugs, or major difficulties. I learned Eagle a few y
by fpgaminer 5y ago
I recently learned KiCad and did some basic boards with it. It was a breeze; didn't run into any crashes, bugs, or major difficulties. I learned Eagle a few years ago, and from my vague memory I remember Eagle being a bit less obvious to use. KiCad felt straightforward in every way except maybe drawing the board cuts.
(I did run into one paper cut. The PCB DRC didn't flag unconnected nets; there's a second button next to Run DRC that checks for unconnected nets. :/ Cost me an hour wondering why my 5V rail wasn't working... )
Was also my first time using one of those cheap, small-run assembly houses. Absolutely incredible. My project was a tweak of an existing product (an RGB LED driver), and I was able to get my boards made and assembled for less than the retail product, even at a volume of 5 and with nicer parts. Crazy.
For anyone looking to learn KiCad, I used this video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7-8nUU6e3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7-8nUU6e3E
- fortysixdegrees 5y agoWhat assembly house did you use?
- stavros 5y agoI use JLCPCB for mine and am extremely satisfied.
- fpgaminer 5y agoJLCPCB; turn time has been about a week and then a few days for DHL to drop it at my door. Their website is very buggy, and the placement preview is useless, but they do have a real engineer review everything before assembly so all my boards have been assembled correctly thus far. They even caught one of my mistakes before. I recommend finding parts using LCSC's website (their parts supplier), as it has more useful parametric search. Then cross reference to JLC's to double check pricing and availability.
- fortysixdegrees 5y agoInteresting. I'm flirting with the idea of ordering boards with all the easy to get discretes on there then finishing by baking on the hard to get chips I have in stock with lower temp solder paste. I would need to cut out the parts of the solder mask with components on there, or maybe I can do that at the Gerber phase
- stavros 5y agoI've been bitten by the DRC window before, but KiBot[0] renders that moot. I have it running as a pre-commit hook, and it generates my Gerbers and everything. That way, all this stuff is automated and I can't make a mistake. Check out my project's config: https://gitlab.com/stavros/esp32-cnc/-/blob/master/project.kibot.yaml https://gitlab.com/stavros/esp32-cnc/-/blob/master/project.k... I wholeheartedly recommend KiCAD, it's fantastic. [0]: https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot#introduction https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot#introduction