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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

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.

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.