Arthur AdmiraalI have only ever used eagle to design my PCB’s. It has suited me fine for the three years that I’ve worked with it, but its limitations bundled with the lack of advanced functionality, such as push and shove routing is starting to get on my nerves. KiCad has been looking more and more promising by the day ever since CERN got involved with it, but the stable release will arrive just to late to be able to design the project on it in time, so it sadly wasn’t an option. I might try it in the future though.
Altium Circuitmaker did arrive in time though, and its feature set looks just plainly terrific, so I went ahead and installed a copy. I wish I hadn’t. I had of course heard about the cloud-only nature of the software, but since this is an open project, I didn’t expect this to be a problem.
So I start up the software, fiddled around with it, and get a bit lost. You know, the typical routine when using a new tool, nothing that can’t be fixed by some practice and a few tutorials. But as I struggled to create my first custom component, it dawned upon me that everyone could see and import this part. Every error I made could upset a lot of people. This made me feel quite uncomfortable. Also, I couldn’t pick the license myself, and didn’t have control over my source files. All of the above made the barrier to entry really large, too large in fact.
So I’m basically stuck with eagle for the time being. It is the tool I’m familiar with, and the tool I’m going to use for this project. It’ll probably come back to bite me in the long run.
Discussions
Become a Hackaday.io Member
Create an account to leave a comment. Already have an account? Log In.
You want to be using the KiCad nightlies.
The last "stable" build is from several years ago, _before_ CERN got involved. Nobody uses them and you can ignore them.
The recent nightlies have all of the good stuff. The devs are also pushing to put out a new stable build in the next couple months, but don't wait for it. It'll be compatible with the stuff you do on the nightlies.
So yeah. You should be using KiCad. Open source is great.
Are you sure? yes | no
I have actually tried one of the nightly builds, I believe it was the one mentioned in CERNs Push 'n Shove video, but the routing was so buggy that it was unusable for me. Of course, being on a mac doesn't help me here. I want to try it on Ubuntu, now that I've got triple booting working, but I haven't gotten around to it.
This is one post I wrote some weeks ago, before designing the project, so I'm afraid it's a bit late to switch over.
However, I totally agree that I *should* be using KiCad. I've lost count of the issues I encountered in eagle, that are completely non-existent in the recent versions of KiCad. Not to mention eagle's pricing structure. It's just that I'm not adventurous enough to use unstable software.
I've been following the news on the new stable closely, and probably switch over as soon as it is out. However, even the original planned date was just a bit too late for this project.
tl;dr: Open source software is awesome, and so is KiCad, but I found the risk of running the unstable version too high for this project.
Are you sure? yes | no
I have heard that the mac build is the least stable of the three. The Linux one is supposed to be the best. I'm invested in a different ecosystem so all of my information is coming from buddies that use it, but isn't the push and shove video really old? I remember that from a year or two ago, don't I?
It sounds like you've done your research, though, so I'll leave you to it :)
Eagle isn't a terrible solution, it has a lot of community support.
Are you sure? yes | no