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I love that this document gives a very complete overview of all the steps that go into creating a printed circuit board! I always say, KiCad is easily better th

I love that this document gives a very complete overview of all the steps that go into creating a printed circuit board! I always say, KiCad is easily better than any ECAD tool you can buy for $1,000 or less. They also have a better built-in library than I've ever encountered in a paid tool, which is worth a lot if someone just wants to crank out a quick project.

deleted 3y ago
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cushychicken 3y ago
Kicad is good enough for 95% of all circuit designs. Maybe 99% in version 7 - haven’t really pulled the bandaid off yet in that regard. If you’re working in a big team, or making really complex stuff like telecom equipment or server motherboards, then I can see the appeal of shelling out for PADS or Altium with their library management and package automation tools. But, I’ve designed hardware on a consulting basis before using Kicad as my EE CAD package of choice. It was more than enough for my needs. That includes simple two layer boards all the way to pretty complicated six layer embedded Linux systems. I particularly like that it comes with an embedded 3D viewer. Coming from only ever using ORCAD before that, it was a huge breath of fresh air, and significantly cut down on the number of connector mistakes I’ve made since.
- crote 3y ago
  KiCad has been significantly improving its library management lately. With 6.0 it got a Plugin and Content Manager, allowing you to trivially add external content libraries to it. The 7.0 release added support for ODBC-based Database Libraries, allowing you to hook it up to basically any database you want in order to provide part metadata. Personally, I thought 5.0 was a big pain to use. With 6.0 it actually got kinda decent, but I still had to write custom code to work around a few of its warts. However, 7.0 shows that it is rapidly moving towards being a serious threat to the proprietary market leaders, and I can't wait to see what the future will bring!
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    The 7.0.x point releases have also consistently addressed a lot of little quality of life pain points and bugs. It's really all so enjoyable to observe from the armchair. I'm not embedded into the Kicad community/project, but it certainly feels like the momentum is there. I love these tentpole moments/projects in the overall fabric of the industry, when an open source project reaches "momentum escape velocity" after sticking around long enough to snowball and eventually eclipse the proprietary alternatives in terms of sheer scale. For example, it's very hard to outcompete the Linux kernel for general applications now simply because everyone's working on it, and no single company can build and retain a team that can outcompete an entire ecosystem, outside of picking very particular battles (e.g. QNX<>Linux). Cynics will point out that this often describes an area of software simply commodity-fying enough that FOSS can now catch and keep up, and pragmatists will point out that the commercial packages often still retain a key feature for e.g. a leading edge/high-end application you can't get from anything else. But be that as it may, it's still beautiful. I like to identify and start watching the projects that may be on the verge of becoming this in their particular domain. For example, Blender may get there or is already there. Could Krita? 20 years from now, could this be Bevy for the game engine space? There's usually certain markers, e.g. healthy governance (this is what gives the project the legs to make it long enough), good mission statement, hygienic tech stack, that sort of thing. For young programmers, this is the type of project to find and join. You end up running an industry when you grow up, and, if that's important to you (there can be other priorities, e.g. shipping important products in general), your hard labor won't die and disappear one day with a company.
jan_Sate 3y ago
The main limitation I've encountered with KiCad is its component library ootb. Anyway those can often be downloaded from third party websites.
- crote 3y ago
  That's not really a limitation for professionals, though. Built-in component libraries are always going to be incomplete, and literally all of them kinda suck. Professional PCB designers almost always have to either create their own footprints from the datasheet, or get them from someone else who did. Trusting third-party footprints is probably the easiest way to end up with fundamentally broken prototypes which are nothing more than fancy desk decorations - I can unfortunately speak from experience. The built-in libraries are basically only used for trivial things like resistor footprints, 2.54mm headers, or solder jumpers. KiCad's libraries are more than good enough for that.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Footprints are less of an issue than schematic library. If you need to say tailor-make QFP-48 footprint that might be some work but you will likely reuse it for multiple parts.
    - crote 3y ago
      Until you find out that a manufacturer decided to use a footprint which looks standard, but uses a custom pin numbering. The schematic symbols are right and so are the KiCad-provided footprints, but they are still not going to work together. But yeah, a lot of chip footprints are quite standard, or require only small modifications from those standard footprints. I do still have to hand-draw quite a few of them, but that's because my designs are usually quite heavy on relatively obscure peripherals.
- leptons 3y ago
  It's not a limitation at all. There are no PCB design programs that have every part ever manufactured in the library. At some point you're going to have to make a PCB footprint yourself no matter what software you use. Pretty much all datasheets have explicit measurements of the footprint layout. Even better if you have the physical part and some calipers.
iancmceachern 3y ago
Have you used Diptrace of Flux.ai? I've personally enjoyed using DipTrace, very intuitive and easy to pick up, it's far less than $1000. I've been hearing good things about Flux but haven't tried it myself yet. I hear it's not complete, but coming along quick.
- coder543 3y ago
  Comments like that are hard to respond to. The topic here is KiCAD, but you haven’t addressed whether you have given KiCAD 7 (or 6) a real try. Without that information, and without understanding what you didn't like about KiCAD, it’s hard to address these other options, and you don’t really even mention what you actually like about DipTrace. “Intuitive” and “easy to pickup” are arguably properties of KiCAD, for anyone familiar with schematic capture and PCB design. It used to be harder, but tons of effort has been poured into KiCAD for many years now. Why would anyone want to use an old, proprietary program like DipTrace when KiCAD is free, cross-platform, open source, and arguably just plain better? DipTrace has a Mac version, but all of the discussions I see online indicate that it still hasn’t been updated to work properly on Apple Silicon. It’s been probably 7 or 8 years since I last saw someone using DipTrace, and I wasn’t impressed then. It’s also $995 for the full version (the closest to KiCAD’s feature set), which is hardly “far less” than $1000, but the absolute minimum version I would even consider would be $400. I’m amazed at how their website seems to be exactly as I remember it from so long ago. Looking through their marketing site, I literally don’t see a single thing that is better than KiCAD. I personally just don’t understand why anyone would buy DipTrace in 2023. So, it’s hard to respond without just coming off as dismissive. I wish I could provide a more balanced comment that makes it seem like DipTrace is still competitive, well-maintained software… but that isn’t what I believe. I’m sure it’s fine for basic use cases, but KiCAD is great for those use cases and so much more. Flux seems gimmicky at first, but browsing through their materials, I am at least impressed at the effort they seem to be putting in. They even had a comparison page against KiCAD, but this attempt to sell against KiCAD ended up being some disappointing nebulous statements that didn’t seem to have much merit, apart from the real time collaborative nature of their product, which seems to be their one actual advantage. Different people can have different opinions, of course, but KiCAD is great quality software with a lot of momentum. If you want to share what features you like most about DipTrace, or what you think it does better than KiCAD, that would certainly be interesting to hear.
robomartin 3y ago
> KiCad is easily better than any ECAD tool you can buy for $1,000 or less. Well, we pulled the plug on Altium when KiCad 6.0 was released and have not looked back. We got really sick of Altium nonsense, just had enough of it. Their focus on cloud to sell the company really caused damage and every release broke something new. We do everything from relatively simple four layer boards to complex multi-GHz boards with challenging signal and power integrity constraints. KiCad has no problem at all providing the tools we need to complete these designs. I can't see ever going back to Altium. As far as libraries are concerned. Professional organizations rarely (I would say, never) use built-in libraries. The reason for this is that you are responsible for reliability, manufacturability and product life-cycle. This means every component needs to be qualified and fully vetted to the extent required by the nature of the product. Which, in turn, means that you are always going to want to define all the components and use internally-built libraries you can trust. There are other reasons for this, that's just the basics.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cushychicken 3y ago

Kicad is good enough for 95% of all circuit designs. Maybe 99% in version 7 - haven’t really pulled the bandaid off yet in that regard. If you’re working in a big team, or making really complex stuff like telecom equipment or server motherboards, then I can see the appeal of shelling out for PADS or Altium with their library management and package automation tools. But, I’ve designed hardware on a consulting basis before using Kicad as my EE CAD package of choice. It was more than enough for my needs. That includes simple two layer boards all the way to pretty complicated six layer embedded Linux systems. I particularly like that it comes with an embedded 3D viewer. Coming from only ever using ORCAD before that, it was a huge breath of fresh air, and significantly cut down on the number of connector mistakes I’ve made since.

crote 3y ago
KiCad has been significantly improving its library management lately. With 6.0 it got a Plugin and Content Manager, allowing you to trivially add external content libraries to it. The 7.0 release added support for ODBC-based Database Libraries, allowing you to hook it up to basically any database you want in order to provide part metadata. Personally, I thought 5.0 was a big pain to use. With 6.0 it actually got kinda decent, but I still had to write custom code to work around a few of its warts. However, 7.0 shows that it is rapidly moving towards being a serious threat to the proprietary market leaders, and I can't wait to see what the future will bring!
- sho_hn 3y ago
  The 7.0.x point releases have also consistently addressed a lot of little quality of life pain points and bugs. It's really all so enjoyable to observe from the armchair. I'm not embedded into the Kicad community/project, but it certainly feels like the momentum is there. I love these tentpole moments/projects in the overall fabric of the industry, when an open source project reaches "momentum escape velocity" after sticking around long enough to snowball and eventually eclipse the proprietary alternatives in terms of sheer scale. For example, it's very hard to outcompete the Linux kernel for general applications now simply because everyone's working on it, and no single company can build and retain a team that can outcompete an entire ecosystem, outside of picking very particular battles (e.g. QNX<>Linux). Cynics will point out that this often describes an area of software simply commodity-fying enough that FOSS can now catch and keep up, and pragmatists will point out that the commercial packages often still retain a key feature for e.g. a leading edge/high-end application you can't get from anything else. But be that as it may, it's still beautiful. I like to identify and start watching the projects that may be on the verge of becoming this in their particular domain. For example, Blender may get there or is already there. Could Krita? 20 years from now, could this be Bevy for the game engine space? There's usually certain markers, e.g. healthy governance (this is what gives the project the legs to make it long enough), good mission statement, hygienic tech stack, that sort of thing. For young programmers, this is the type of project to find and join. You end up running an industry when you grow up, and, if that's important to you (there can be other priorities, e.g. shipping important products in general), your hard labor won't die and disappear one day with a company.

jan_Sate 3y ago

The main limitation I've encountered with KiCad is its component library ootb. Anyway those can often be downloaded from third party websites.

crote 3y ago
That's not really a limitation for professionals, though. Built-in component libraries are always going to be incomplete, and literally all of them kinda suck. Professional PCB designers almost always have to either create their own footprints from the datasheet, or get them from someone else who did. Trusting third-party footprints is probably the easiest way to end up with fundamentally broken prototypes which are nothing more than fancy desk decorations - I can unfortunately speak from experience. The built-in libraries are basically only used for trivial things like resistor footprints, 2.54mm headers, or solder jumpers. KiCad's libraries are more than good enough for that.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Footprints are less of an issue than schematic library. If you need to say tailor-make QFP-48 footprint that might be some work but you will likely reuse it for multiple parts.
  - crote 3y ago
    Until you find out that a manufacturer decided to use a footprint which looks standard, but uses a custom pin numbering. The schematic symbols are right and so are the KiCad-provided footprints, but they are still not going to work together. But yeah, a lot of chip footprints are quite standard, or require only small modifications from those standard footprints. I do still have to hand-draw quite a few of them, but that's because my designs are usually quite heavy on relatively obscure peripherals.
leptons 3y ago
It's not a limitation at all. There are no PCB design programs that have every part ever manufactured in the library. At some point you're going to have to make a PCB footprint yourself no matter what software you use. Pretty much all datasheets have explicit measurements of the footprint layout. Even better if you have the physical part and some calipers.

iancmceachern 3y ago

Have you used Diptrace of Flux.ai? I've personally enjoyed using DipTrace, very intuitive and easy to pick up, it's far less than $1000. I've been hearing good things about Flux but haven't tried it myself yet. I hear it's not complete, but coming along quick.

coder543 3y ago
Comments like that are hard to respond to. The topic here is KiCAD, but you haven’t addressed whether you have given KiCAD 7 (or 6) a real try. Without that information, and without understanding what you didn't like about KiCAD, it’s hard to address these other options, and you don’t really even mention what you actually like about DipTrace. “Intuitive” and “easy to pickup” are arguably properties of KiCAD, for anyone familiar with schematic capture and PCB design. It used to be harder, but tons of effort has been poured into KiCAD for many years now. Why would anyone want to use an old, proprietary program like DipTrace when KiCAD is free, cross-platform, open source, and arguably just plain better? DipTrace has a Mac version, but all of the discussions I see online indicate that it still hasn’t been updated to work properly on Apple Silicon. It’s been probably 7 or 8 years since I last saw someone using DipTrace, and I wasn’t impressed then. It’s also $995 for the full version (the closest to KiCAD’s feature set), which is hardly “far less” than $1000, but the absolute minimum version I would even consider would be $400. I’m amazed at how their website seems to be exactly as I remember it from so long ago. Looking through their marketing site, I literally don’t see a single thing that is better than KiCAD. I personally just don’t understand why anyone would buy DipTrace in 2023. So, it’s hard to respond without just coming off as dismissive. I wish I could provide a more balanced comment that makes it seem like DipTrace is still competitive, well-maintained software… but that isn’t what I believe. I’m sure it’s fine for basic use cases, but KiCAD is great for those use cases and so much more. Flux seems gimmicky at first, but browsing through their materials, I am at least impressed at the effort they seem to be putting in. They even had a comparison page against KiCAD, but this attempt to sell against KiCAD ended up being some disappointing nebulous statements that didn’t seem to have much merit, apart from the real time collaborative nature of their product, which seems to be their one actual advantage. Different people can have different opinions, of course, but KiCAD is great quality software with a lot of momentum. If you want to share what features you like most about DipTrace, or what you think it does better than KiCAD, that would certainly be interesting to hear.

robomartin 3y ago

> KiCad is easily better than any ECAD tool you can buy for $1,000 or less. Well, we pulled the plug on Altium when KiCad 6.0 was released and have not looked back. We got really sick of Altium nonsense, just had enough of it. Their focus on cloud to sell the company really caused damage and every release broke something new. We do everything from relatively simple four layer boards to complex multi-GHz boards with challenging signal and power integrity constraints. KiCad has no problem at all providing the tools we need to complete these designs. I can't see ever going back to Altium. As far as libraries are concerned. Professional organizations rarely (I would say, never) use built-in libraries. The reason for this is that you are responsible for reliability, manufacturability and product life-cycle. This means every component needs to be qualified and fully vetted to the extent required by the nature of the product. Which, in turn, means that you are always going to want to define all the components and use internally-built libraries you can trust. There are other reasons for this, that's just the basics.