3 ms·

This. Although I think Altium is the more offensive toolset. The real fly in the ointment for open source hardware is the proprietary tooling.

TD-Linux 11y ago
I've since moved on to KiCAD and been pretty happy with it. Something like this board would still be near difficult to impossible, though, as impedance matching for the DDR lines doesn't really exist in KiCAD. I also ordered a few ICEsticks to play with the new icestorm open source toolchain. That FPGA is in no way comparable to a Spartan 6, though.
- dfox 11y ago
  New KiCAD versions (from bzr) have push and shove interactive router which also can do length matching and differential pairs, although the whole thing is far from complete and stable but it is usable (for example, the "push and shove" part does not work when routing diff pairs and when you move move mouse too fast in plain track routing mode it just crashes). One problem with these new features is that they are somehow linked to new implementation of pcbnew's canvas which also implies somewhat different UI behavior (more windows-like, with selection of individual PCB elements and so on), which I generally don't like that much. Anyhow I recently used current kicad from bzr for somewhat non-trivial board (smallish FPGA in TQFP, ARM MCU, some analog RF, few LVDS lines).
michaelt 11y ago
Altium have recently released 'circuitmaker' which is basically a $0 version of Altium, for open hardware. I guess it's meant to compete with Eagle, which a lot of open hardware projects use. It's still closed source (like Eagle). And it's Windows-only. And currently there's a DirectX conflict with VirtualBox so you can't use it there (reportedly it works in other VMs). But it's cheaper than paying $9000-a-seat-plus-$1000-a-year-maintainance for commercial Altium.

3 ms·

This. Although I think Altium is the more offensive toolset. The real fly in the ointment for open source hardware is the proprietary tooling.

by aceperry 11y ago

TD-Linux 11y ago
I've since moved on to KiCAD and been pretty happy with it. Something like this board would still be near difficult to impossible, though, as impedance matching for the DDR lines doesn't really exist in KiCAD. I also ordered a few ICEsticks to play with the new icestorm open source toolchain. That FPGA is in no way comparable to a Spartan 6, though.
- dfox 11y ago
  New KiCAD versions (from bzr) have push and shove interactive router which also can do length matching and differential pairs, although the whole thing is far from complete and stable but it is usable (for example, the "push and shove" part does not work when routing diff pairs and when you move move mouse too fast in plain track routing mode it just crashes). One problem with these new features is that they are somehow linked to new implementation of pcbnew's canvas which also implies somewhat different UI behavior (more windows-like, with selection of individual PCB elements and so on), which I generally don't like that much. Anyhow I recently used current kicad from bzr for somewhat non-trivial board (smallish FPGA in TQFP, ARM MCU, some analog RF, few LVDS lines).
michaelt 11y ago
Altium have recently released 'circuitmaker' which is basically a $0 version of Altium, for open hardware. I guess it's meant to compete with Eagle, which a lot of open hardware projects use. It's still closed source (like Eagle). And it's Windows-only. And currently there's a DirectX conflict with VirtualBox so you can't use it there (reportedly it works in other VMs). But it's cheaper than paying $9000-a-seat-plus-$1000-a-year-maintainance for commercial Altium.