geekhack Projects > Making Stuff Together!
The Living PCB Design Thread
mkawa:
doesn't designspark tie you to their fab? expressPCB also has a free piece of design software, but it ties you to their fab. kicad sort of is what it is. it's a weirdly architected, very buggy layout and netlist editor. eagle is the industry standard but has a correspondingly high price tag. even the individual student professional version is 820$.
however, the audio folks have been using eagle anyway for quite a while. there are a couple tricks. first, design onto multiple boards. yes, this is difficult for a keyboard layout, but keyboard layouts are mostly cut and paste, and no one said you had to put the keyboard matrix and the controller on the same board. second, the pricing is set up to get you to buy a number of seats. i am open to banding together under the geekhackers banner to standardize on eagle. at 10 licenses of layout + schem (autorouting = bleh), we're looking at about 340$ per seat. have you seen the pricing on solidworks lately? this is pretty reasonable comparatively.
the really big benefit of eagle is not necessarily how flashy or user friendly it is but just that it's extremely standard, which makes collaboration on a board easier. otherwise, kicad is probably the way to go. diptrace, if it seems to work as well as eagle and is more intuitive to build and use than kicad, hits that same price tier at half the users.
MOZ:
If we all are going to work on one platform, even if kicad we can build our own library together and that is what really matters, no?
bpiphany:
I find KiCAD to be a great "product", the developer version is even better. It's great that everything is ascii-files. You can script things if you want to, and do tweaks to footprints with a simple text editor. I have run across a few bugs but I think they have all been taken care of by now. You can submit bugs when you find them https://launchpad.net/kicad. Some times they are handled very promptly, other times they seem to never be "fixed". And you could always contribute by fixing them yourself...
Keyboard PCBs aren't very complex, really. More advanced electronics could perhaps need more advanced tools, I don't know, I haven't been there yet. You want gerber files in the end (anything else is just unacceptable) and the closer to gerbers I am to start with (read text files) the happier I am =)
And you should create your own footprints (or at least check them very carefully) following the specs on the exact parts you intend to use anyway.
Dubsgalore:
This is really great, just seeing this now, hopefully will be a great useful resource
komar007:
It looks like KiCad is missing some good tutorial focused on producing a real thing from the schematic to production.
It really isn't bad piece of software, just unfinished and a bit buggy. It doesn't have some useful features that the expensive programs have, but it certainly does cope pretty well.
As every EDA program, it requires a lot of practice and understanding first, but because of the the way the design process looks, the software can't just let us draw things in a nice and intuitive way. KiCad just requires a bit more of these things than other software because of it's poor integration between the components.
But if you look at how switching between schematic and board is done, it really has everything you need without builtin version control, diffs and binary files. It just requires a little knowledge of the formats it uses and the way things are implemented.
The last drawback is actually a feature for hackers. The files are very easy to edit manually or with scripts in some cases where the software just doesn't cope (yet).
One of the important steps to use any cheap EDA software easily is to understand that you will eventually have to design your own schematic components and footprints. With the number of different packages these days, you'll always at least have to prepare your own footprints, unless the vendor has done that for you (and if they have, it's usually Altium only).
Because the footprint and component drawing capability is pretty sensible in KiCad, the sooner you get used to it, the better.
The second step would be to always put all the libraries and modules to your project's directory instead of relying on the builtin library to make sure your project can be easily opened somewhere else.
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