For folks who are considering Kicad, but not sure if it will be useful at a professional level...
We professionally design, engineer and manufacture accessible technology for disabled veterans and we are also developing robotic systems for industrial automation.
We have a half-dozen active projects running on Kicad and have been using it for almost 4 years now.
As with anything, there have been occasional frustrations with updates but overall, the tool consistently gets better over time.
The main decision to select Kicad was based on the plain text representation of project state which enables (1) improved workflows with Git, (2) scriptable bulk edits (3) simpler, sharable extensions / plugins and (4) easier continuous integration for build artifacts.
I learned PCB design on Eagle, switched to Kicad about 5 years ago, and in the last three years have really been doing a LOT of PCB design with Kicad. I love it so much!
Here's a dense four layer brushless motor control board I designed recently, which can be viewed online in the amazing Kicanvas viewer:
This is me too. My first projects were in Eagle, primarily because it was the de facto standard for EDA for hobbyists for a while. KiCAD used to be awful and very challenging.
In the last several years, it’s really improved and I enjoy using it. If you haven’t picked it up in a while, give it a shot.
wow, kicanvas looks great for sharing designs, is the idea that you use github for versioning your kicad folder (probably better than my current lazy dropbox option) and then you can just share the designs with people?
that is a cool website.
can you share designs privately with team members? it looks great for collaborating if it's got authentication.
Agreed, although I'd say KiCad was pretty rough 4 years ago but it got good in 2021 with version 6. It used to be good enough for a saint, but now it's good enough for a whiny picky person such as myself.
I saw the writing on the wall for EagleCAD once they stopped releasing any kind of bug fixes despite charging subscription fees and started ignoring the forums other than triaging the complaints. It was clear they were going to do this and break EagleCAD to force people to use Fusion 360.
I don't use Windows, I don't want to, I've used Fusion 360 and it was slow as heck, didn't have constraint based solving that worked, was written in some awful system that made it require an internet connection, and they want me to use an EagleCAD-themed editor that they've hacked in?
I switched to using KiCAD for all new projects a year ago. It was a little bit of a learning curve. I started with designing a flexible heater PCB, which was good for a learning project because it had so few components. Now I'm making PCBs with four layers, inner ground and power planes, custom design rules, using fancy add-ons, taking full advantage of the HTML BOM plugin when teaching grad students how to solder, and I can be 100% sure that even if it gets worse I can still get the old version to work (probably).
Even the part library is more coherent and higher quality (!) than the EagleCAD one. I literally refused to use the built in EagleCAD libraries because the quality was so variable, sometimes it's fine, sometimes I ruin an entire PCB because their version of SO-8 had a weird width. KiCAD is way better, it's closer to OrCAD and lets me make the schematic, assign the footprints, and if I don't like a footprint I can just edit it on the fly for that document or to just save a new version of the footprint forever.
I've even got it set up to use Dropbox to share designs between computers (no issues) and that includes downloading STP 3D models and adding them to my footprints.
I know it's going to take me a while longer to be nearly as adept as I was at EagleCAD, and I'm going to miss that autorouter (the KiCAD one is very good for what it is, but it's a hard problem). There's a lot of keyboard shortcuts that you internalize after 20 years of using a program.
But it will be worth it, and frankly already is worth it. I've had to make like four custom footprints because the default library is just so well organized that I can actually find the one or maybe two versions of WSON-10 or whatever instead of having to guess which library has the version that matches my mechanical drawing.
How do you go about doing the mechanical drawing for a footprint not found in the library? I tried to design a simple SD card board as a learning project. I gave up when the part that I selected was difficult to draw. I was not sure whether I was missing some information or is it my inexperience. My persistence on learning and eventual failure left me with the bad taste.
PS: The part I selected seemed to be a generic brand and did not get any info to clarify the dimensions.
KiCad continues to improve, and that plain text file thing is a killer feature. Also in the new version they added the capability to have library databases for components which is a massive step towards professional libraries.
If they could bring in better signal integrity tools and Altiums outjobs, it would be a no brainer to use KiCad for hobbyist to small business applications.
KiCad is sorely lacking facilities for analyzing trace impedance and power plane capacity - very simple features and all of the building parts (mainly the board stackup information) are already there.
I've wanted to add this stuff (and hopefully push upstream), but haven't been able to find the time.
These are basically table stakes in every commercial offering.
Yes but these are not showstoppers. You can do a lot with scripting in Python (and e.g. Shapely for geometrical processing) and you can even find other user's scripts online. Of course, it would be nice if e.g. computing the length of a trace was as simple as a mouse click (perhaps it is in the newest version), but this is certainly no reason for many to switch to a closed, expensive, commercial tool.
We switched from Altium to kicad and it was a good decision. However, we weren’t really successful to port projects from Altium to kicad. So, we still need a Altiun license. I am sure there are features in Altium that kicad is missing, but for our application - power electronics- we haven’t missed anything so far.
Did you use Altium BOM tools? I found them to be incredible, does KiCAD have something similar to handle BOM generation via something like octopart?
I miss that, it made my BOMs so much more trustworthy.
How's Kicad's autoroute these days? For anyone who says "no Pro uses autoroute" I can say electronics is a hobby for me and when I'm designing a PCB I like to autoroute first, see all the issues, then go back, move my components, autoroute again, once I arrive at optimal placement I do maybe 10% of traces manually (these are the ones autorouter does weird stuff with) then I let autoroute deal with remaining 90% of repetitive stuff. Finally I just tweak few things here and there. I think I tried kicad few years ago and I was back to altium very quickly. For typical hobby use one can't really afford altium so kicad is the only way to go, but if you can have it I'd choose altium every time.
[1] There are options, but honestly I never seen the point for small boards. There just seem to be rarely the case where setup and fiddling with settings is all that faster than just routing few dozen traces.
I guess if I wanted to route something like big keyboard with a bunch of leds, but overall routing PCB is just such small overall part of the project that I just play some podcast in the background and play the PCB puzzle/sudoku challenge.
But then I like going back and forth and even changing schematic a bit to make routing nicer.
There is now basic autoroute capability that works on a selection of traces. There is still no whole-board autoroute, and although in theory you could just select all items in the board and hit autoroute, it is not functionally designed to work this way.
No, but as a former altium user who was burned by altium, if you aren't working on a team with multiple users, it is well worth the pain to get rid of altium. There are some muscle memory things you might have frustrations with the first few weeks, but it has been smooth sailing after the transition period.
My only complaint with KiCad is their library/BOM management is a bit clunky, but the fact you can automate things so much easier vs altium more than makes up for it.
I've at this point needed to convert projects between Eagle, KiCAD, OrCAD, and a few others.
I've seen Altium do decent at open EagleCAD. I've seen KiCAD do much better at opening EagleCAD. I assume KiCAD and EagleCAD work decently well with one another's file formats due to both being text based and documented.
That said, no matter how much someone paid for the software being converted from or to, I've yet to see a project that wasn't better served by starting from scratch and reproducing the design. Each tool just has a somewhat different paradigm (or default grid spacing or whatever) and like... EagleCAD symbols imported into Altium work they just suck. For example.
I've been dealing with this mess for a while. My colleague has decades worth of PCB designs trapped in OrCAD pre-cadence. I've been pushing him to EagleCAD, and have been pushing myself towards KiCAD for over a year. Now I'm telling him "hey, it's closer to orcad" and "the HTML BOM will make your life way easier training grad students" and "the package library is way more reliable" and these are legitimate honest-to-god features that are convincing to an experienced designer.
You see enough proprietary tools like this get the death knell and you learn to recognize the signs I guess. This one was pretty obvious and thankfully y'all have three years to download KiCAD ASAP, use it for every single project from here on out, gradually transition legacy documents in every CAD system to KiCAD. For once in my life I'll have some well-grounded confidence that my designs are safe and highly likely to still be usable in ten years when I badly need to debug them and create a new board revision.
Honestly, we had a bit trouble converting Altium projects to KiCad and kind of gave up on it. Probably also depends on complexity of the board and maybe we just need to invest more time into it. But for now we have to maintain a Altium license for older boards. All the new stuff we build in KiCad.
Yeah, I see no reason to use Eagle over KiCAD, and KiCAD is rapidly catching up on a pretty stagnant Altium, so for many users KiCAD is better choice there, even with money no object.
for me, it is a bit funny. i started using kicad because phil hagelberg created his keyboard using scheme to generate a kicad_pcb file. then one night, i am too tired to type on keyboard, i decided to put the components directly on kicad using mouse. now when i need (or want) to create a pcb, i just open kicad.
You have a schema capture tool (eeschema) and a board design (pcbnew). Start a new project, then start doing your circuit design in eeschema. I personally always disable move on zoom and install the solarized dark plugin, since it looks quite nice.
- Click and hold Middle mouse to move around the schematic / board view.
- P - places a power symbol (gnd / v+)
- A - add component
- E - edits parameters
- X - rotates on x axis
- Y - rotates on y axis
- M - move stuff
There are a ton of symbols installed by default, I recommend just browsing to see what kind of organization there is.
The "contextual electronics" tutorials on youtube are good to begin with. They are with older versions but most of the technique is unchanged for the most part.
Basics are still there.
There are some good books out there too such as "Kicad like a pro" which come recommended by people I trust.
#kicad @liberachat IRC is still active too as well as other channels.
The official guide [0] is good, but a bit too detailed.
I started out with ruiqimao's mechanical keyboard PCB guide [1], which I think is good enough to get my feet wet. From then on it's just messing around and checking the doc along the way.
Find some existing project similar to yours that has a PCB and a circuit diagram. I tend to recommend that synth DIY folks look at something like yusynth.net, and Yves Usson's designs. It doesn't have to be done in Kicad and indeed it might be better if it's not.
Redraw the circuit in Kicad, then redraw the PCB. See how close you can get to the original.
That way you're climbing the "learn how to use Kicad" learning curve, without having to climb the "learn how to lay out a PCB and circuit diagram" learning curve :-)
My workflow (I'm a hobbyist, take what I say with a grain of salt):
- Installed "library loader" which Supports kicad
- Sign up for componentsearchengine.com
- Find parts I need on mouser.com/mouser.de (I'm in Germany) and look them up on component search engine, download the cad files; library loader picks them up automatically
- Use them in the schematic view, get your schematic finished FIRST
- Then "Update PCB from schematic". This imports all of the individual footprints and stuff you need to wire together.
- From here, should be like most other CADs; wire up your rats nest, do your ground fills ("Fill area" tool on the right), etc.
- Export Gerbers and drills after googling "jlcpcb export kicad 6" (they don't have a 7 guide yet but doesn't matter) just to double check the settings, then upload to jlc and they arrive about a week and a half later.
- In the schematic view, go to tools and then Generate BOM. It takes some finagling but you can usually massage the CSV it generates to upload to Mouser's shopping cart page to get an exact amount of parts you need, including the ability to specify multiples. Note that usually upping the amount of small components results in more for less overall cost (yes, really) so play with the quantities. Resistors can be purchased for a few bucks at the 500 to 1000 quantity, and are usually cheaper to do that than to order 5 or 10. Anyway, then you order your parts.
The "use footprints from other people" thing is contentious, I know. Most serious engineers make their own footprints. I don't have the time, personally, since unless I'm missing something it requires freecad for me to get the measurements right, and kicad doesn't have the required constraint solving tools to allow me to make sure I've got all of it right, so the workflow is CRAZY inefficient (lots of importing drawings from freecad, manually creating pads, then using multi-select and align tools to get them where they need to be...).
Kicad with a constraint solver like freecad's would be a ridiculously huge improvement IMO, but hopefully this is enough to get someone tinkering. Kicad devs if you're reading... pleeeeease. I know it's a lot of work.
They did not mention Linux at all in the notice. EAGLE supported Linux but as far as I know, Fusion 360 does not. Maybe I am their only user that cares, but this is the main reason I will be pushing my coworkers to migrate to KiCad.
When Autodesk claim Fusion 360 has the same functionality as Eagle and can replace it, that is a lie. It does not work on Linux so it is not a valid replacement.
They definitely don't care, or at least Miguel got ignored.
Fusion 360 is so slow and bloated it's an embarrassment on Windows. Takes minutes just to start. Loading it in VMware is a joke (my best computer is Ubuntu). I was willing to put up with it for doing 3D board renderings, but no. Not for actual work.
I cannot open an app inside a badly written and slow program with excessive DRM with a subset of the features of the program I've used for 20 years. It's just not happening. I will switch to KiCAD first, it's not nearly as big and uninteresting a transition. If I made MCAD + ECAD stuff more, maybe, but seriously how many people do that. It's a dream. It's super cool when and if it works.
It's like VR though. It has three real use cases -- checking interferences, shifting component positions to address interferences, and making accurate panel cutouts. That's all I've found. The first two are simply enough handled with IDF. Or a STP export from KiCAD which works fine. And a panel cutout can be addressed with a STP export too.
It's cute, Fusion 360, in that it tries to be MCAD, ECAD, etc all in one place. It, like most things of that nature, does badly at all of them. Features should be optional, let me explore MCAD-ECAD integration when I decide it would be an advantage rather than because of software limitations.
Yea, I have looked at F360 EDA and there are a lot of features that either are buggy as hell or just don't exist. I'm not sure that F360 is going to get much uptake from EEs until the software has had a few more years to bake and by then, most will likely have migrated to other tools.
That Fusion 360 doesn't work on Linux is probably a business decision too, because it packs a lot of web tech. F360 isn't very far from a packaged web app.
Fusion 360 is very much a native app. Qt and all that jazz. Just one that's been nerfed in the name of cloud. Certainly it's trending more towards "cloud based" features over the years. As for Linux support, Fusion was kept around despite never turning a profit because it was the CEO's pet project. To that end I'd expect that not supporting Linux was mostly a business decision. Technically I don't think there's a ton of institutional knowledge around Linux on the product teams.
It's been well known internally that it makes an atrocious amount of RPC calls since the Carl Bass days. If I had to make a guess, I'd say that historically most of what you've seen with slow startup relates to authorization more than anything else. You could probably mitmproxy it if you really wanted to, the last time I checked they weren't doing any certificate pinning. Hell, at one point Little Snitch even wanted to know if I wanted to access a staging server.
Autodesk bought EAGLE in 2016, so just about ten years between acquisition and discontinuation.
EAGLE is the first PCB design app I learned (and had a harder onramp than React) so this is sad, but it is important to note that most hobbyists have already switched over to KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/
Even professionally, some of the places I worked for lately preferred KiCAD because you can check in libraries and projects to git and see meaningful diffs.
I am not sure if you realize that Eagle is fully embedded and rebranded within Fusion360 so you will have access to the same functionality but in integrated environment (for better or worse)
Speaking as a subscriber to Fusion: Do-it-all software is nearly always inferior to special purpose software. I don't use the built-in Eagle functionality in Fusion even though I've paid for it.
Yeah, I have no love for Autodesk as a begrudging Fusion360 user, but on the surface it seems that 10 years before sunsetting an acquired product as well as integrating it into an existing platform in that same timeframe is pretty good as far as a product acquisition goes from an end user perspective.
Surprised it lasted that long. This reminds me of when they bought out Softimage in 2009 because XSI might have grown into something that challenges Maya, then released the last version in 2014 after delivering five years of barely any new features.
It's anecdotal, but I just recently started getting into more hardware-oriented stuff and found that KiCad came recommended for PCB design/etc. I found it to be pretty useful, but I'm too much of a novice to really give it a fair shake.
My advice to new kicad users is just to watch someone on YouTube go through a familiar project and see how their flow is, then try to create your own project from design to implementation. Next, check out the kicad library guidelines to see what it takes to create a library part so you can get everything right. Lastly, open up the shortcuts screen so you can see what key does what, you’ll get the most common ones quickly and the others you can see when you are going through menus.
Also used EAGLE first briefly for hobbyist work, right after it got acquired, but my team switched to Altium soon that seemed maybe too powerful for my sake. I used KiCad afterwards and it works on Mac like EAGLE did.
Not surprised. This guarantees Kicad all day long for hobby hackers going forward.
In other news, the "free" version of their Fusion 360 loses functionality to the paid version on a regular basis. Wonder if it will suffer a similar fate, or if the free version will end up to forever suffer as some emaciated skeleton of the real app.
I work with random vendors from Ali Express, I do have to say there has been a growing number of them giving me zipped KiCAD files with edit histories indicating they likely used it to develop the project on.
The big advantage that Altium had for a while was that they were an available, portable format for parts libraries. Everybody was producing and giving away their symbol libraries in Altium format so you could always take whatever design you were given, extract the parts, fix any bugs or weirdness, and get on with life. Since those libraries accompanied the design, you knew those parts symbols had been proven out on at least one real PCB somewhere.
Then Altium went and closed those library formats so that you couldn't tear the parts out anymore. I dropped Altium right then, 100% for KiCad. I had already been doing about a quarter of my designs in KiCad, but I went all in when Altium did that.
Judging by the footprints/models I come across (from real companies doing 10M+ part volumes annually), there appears to be an entire society built around Altium Designer 2009 and educational licenses of Solidworks.
I just wish there was an actually free version of what Fusion360 offers. Even if it wasn’t nearly as good, like even half as good, it would be sufficient for hobby work. It’s just that to do anything remotely fancy there is simply no alternative. FreeCAD is just not even in the same league, sadly enough. The difference is so high that it’s not even worthwhile to discuss them together
I think the governance of the freecad project has recently changed so I'm cautiously hopeful that it will finally start seeing some project management and UX love.
3D printing is in the same boat. It seems the whole CAD industry just wants to shoot itself in the foot and push people towards open source tools.
When I was into 3D printing 5 years ago I learnt Fusion 360 and it seemed like one of the better free-for-hobbyist tools, but even then it was buggy on Windows (didn't properly support 4K) and features were slowly being moved behind the premium paywall. SketchUp is also quite popular, but people stick to the old version that can be run offline, as the newer web based versions don't have the same features.
I've been burned with enough (temporarily) 'free' CAD software that I've finally made the permanent switch to FreeCAD.
I am a huge fan and can easily recommend it.
Maybe in the past, FreeCAD wasnt good, but today its just CAD software. Sure it might not have a wire harness tool that gives you a report about different wires, but I've used enough CATIA to know that CATIA doesnt work either. (maybe hyperbole, but basically Catia tools were so bad, my company ended up writing our own checks).
Bonus points that there is already google indexed support for every question you can imagine. Can't say that about niche Catia stuff.
Around mid 2018 I was working on a personal project that absolutely needed a custom PCB.
KiCad 5 had just launched, and so I flipped a coin to decide if I should make it in Eagle or Kicad. I ended up choosing KiCad. Looking back five years later, I could not be happier.
Now almost on a monthly basis I hear about Fusion360 receiving some kind of update that strips features away in lieu of running them exclusively in the cloud, or they just arbitrarily change things and make it qualitatively worse for the end user by upselling them features. I don't want anything to do with that and so HP isn't getting a dime of my money.
The only thing I am happy about Autodesk is that they do at least attempt maintaining a Mac version. Wish this was more common on other CAD developers.
We're a heavy AutoDESK using company. BricsCAD is looking more and more tempting. AutoCAD is a slow and heavy dinosaur and the amount of innovation and improvement between versions is honestly atrocious.
Readit News
We professionally design, engineer and manufacture accessible technology for disabled veterans and we are also developing robotic systems for industrial automation.
We have a half-dozen active projects running on Kicad and have been using it for almost 4 years now.
As with anything, there have been occasional frustrations with updates but overall, the tool consistently gets better over time.
The main decision to select Kicad was based on the plain text representation of project state which enables (1) improved workflows with Git, (2) scriptable bulk edits (3) simpler, sharable extensions / plugins and (4) easier continuous integration for build artifacts.
Here's a dense four layer brushless motor control board I designed recently, which can be viewed online in the amazing Kicanvas viewer:
https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fiel...
In the last several years, it’s really improved and I enjoy using it. If you haven’t picked it up in a while, give it a shot.
that is a cool website.
can you share designs privately with team members? it looks great for collaborating if it's got authentication.
I'm really enjoying watching the progress on your motor controller!
<3
I really like your description of patience in software. I think I'll borrow this for future things I want others to try.
I don't use Windows, I don't want to, I've used Fusion 360 and it was slow as heck, didn't have constraint based solving that worked, was written in some awful system that made it require an internet connection, and they want me to use an EagleCAD-themed editor that they've hacked in?
I switched to using KiCAD for all new projects a year ago. It was a little bit of a learning curve. I started with designing a flexible heater PCB, which was good for a learning project because it had so few components. Now I'm making PCBs with four layers, inner ground and power planes, custom design rules, using fancy add-ons, taking full advantage of the HTML BOM plugin when teaching grad students how to solder, and I can be 100% sure that even if it gets worse I can still get the old version to work (probably).
Even the part library is more coherent and higher quality (!) than the EagleCAD one. I literally refused to use the built in EagleCAD libraries because the quality was so variable, sometimes it's fine, sometimes I ruin an entire PCB because their version of SO-8 had a weird width. KiCAD is way better, it's closer to OrCAD and lets me make the schematic, assign the footprints, and if I don't like a footprint I can just edit it on the fly for that document or to just save a new version of the footprint forever.
I've even got it set up to use Dropbox to share designs between computers (no issues) and that includes downloading STP 3D models and adding them to my footprints.
I know it's going to take me a while longer to be nearly as adept as I was at EagleCAD, and I'm going to miss that autorouter (the KiCAD one is very good for what it is, but it's a hard problem). There's a lot of keyboard shortcuts that you internalize after 20 years of using a program.
But it will be worth it, and frankly already is worth it. I've had to make like four custom footprints because the default library is just so well organized that I can actually find the one or maybe two versions of WSON-10 or whatever instead of having to guess which library has the version that matches my mechanical drawing.
PS: The part I selected seemed to be a generic brand and did not get any info to clarify the dimensions.
1. https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot
https://sschueller.github.io/posts/ci-cd-with-kicad-and-gitl...
If they could bring in better signal integrity tools and Altiums outjobs, it would be a no brainer to use KiCad for hobbyist to small business applications.
I've wanted to add this stuff (and hopefully push upstream), but haven't been able to find the time.
These are basically table stakes in every commercial offering.
Perhaps now, Kicad devs can get even more support to make it better.
If it would weigh anything, this alone would be worth its weight in gold.
I guess if I wanted to route something like big keyboard with a bunch of leds, but overall routing PCB is just such small overall part of the project that I just play some podcast in the background and play the PCB puzzle/sudoku challenge.
But then I like going back and forth and even changing schematic a bit to make routing nicer.
- [1] https://hackaday.com/2023/04/14/kicad-autorouting-made-easy/
Deleted Comment
My only complaint with KiCad is their library/BOM management is a bit clunky, but the fact you can automate things so much easier vs altium more than makes up for it.
I've seen Altium do decent at open EagleCAD. I've seen KiCAD do much better at opening EagleCAD. I assume KiCAD and EagleCAD work decently well with one another's file formats due to both being text based and documented.
That said, no matter how much someone paid for the software being converted from or to, I've yet to see a project that wasn't better served by starting from scratch and reproducing the design. Each tool just has a somewhat different paradigm (or default grid spacing or whatever) and like... EagleCAD symbols imported into Altium work they just suck. For example.
I've been dealing with this mess for a while. My colleague has decades worth of PCB designs trapped in OrCAD pre-cadence. I've been pushing him to EagleCAD, and have been pushing myself towards KiCAD for over a year. Now I'm telling him "hey, it's closer to orcad" and "the HTML BOM will make your life way easier training grad students" and "the package library is way more reliable" and these are legitimate honest-to-god features that are convincing to an experienced designer.
You see enough proprietary tools like this get the death knell and you learn to recognize the signs I guess. This one was pretty obvious and thankfully y'all have three years to download KiCAD ASAP, use it for every single project from here on out, gradually transition legacy documents in every CAD system to KiCAD. For once in my life I'll have some well-grounded confidence that my designs are safe and highly likely to still be usable in ten years when I badly need to debug them and create a new board revision.
I'm planning on making some very simple circuits, nothing fancy.
You have a schema capture tool (eeschema) and a board design (pcbnew). Start a new project, then start doing your circuit design in eeschema. I personally always disable move on zoom and install the solarized dark plugin, since it looks quite nice.
There are a ton of symbols installed by default, I recommend just browsing to see what kind of organization there is.Covers all the bases: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEBQazB0HUyR24ckSZ5u05TZH...
Basics are still there.
There are some good books out there too such as "Kicad like a pro" which come recommended by people I trust.
#kicad @liberachat IRC is still active too as well as other channels.
[0]:https://docs.kicad.org/7.0/en/getting_started_in_kicad/getti... [1]:https://github.com/ruiqimao/keyboard-pcb-guide
Redraw the circuit in Kicad, then redraw the PCB. See how close you can get to the original.
That way you're climbing the "learn how to use Kicad" learning curve, without having to climb the "learn how to lay out a PCB and circuit diagram" learning curve :-)
My workflow (I'm a hobbyist, take what I say with a grain of salt):
- Installed "library loader" which Supports kicad
- Sign up for componentsearchengine.com
- Find parts I need on mouser.com/mouser.de (I'm in Germany) and look them up on component search engine, download the cad files; library loader picks them up automatically
- Use them in the schematic view, get your schematic finished FIRST
- Then "Update PCB from schematic". This imports all of the individual footprints and stuff you need to wire together.
- From here, should be like most other CADs; wire up your rats nest, do your ground fills ("Fill area" tool on the right), etc.
- Export Gerbers and drills after googling "jlcpcb export kicad 6" (they don't have a 7 guide yet but doesn't matter) just to double check the settings, then upload to jlc and they arrive about a week and a half later.
- In the schematic view, go to tools and then Generate BOM. It takes some finagling but you can usually massage the CSV it generates to upload to Mouser's shopping cart page to get an exact amount of parts you need, including the ability to specify multiples. Note that usually upping the amount of small components results in more for less overall cost (yes, really) so play with the quantities. Resistors can be purchased for a few bucks at the 500 to 1000 quantity, and are usually cheaper to do that than to order 5 or 10. Anyway, then you order your parts.
The "use footprints from other people" thing is contentious, I know. Most serious engineers make their own footprints. I don't have the time, personally, since unless I'm missing something it requires freecad for me to get the measurements right, and kicad doesn't have the required constraint solving tools to allow me to make sure I've got all of it right, so the workflow is CRAZY inefficient (lots of importing drawings from freecad, manually creating pads, then using multi-select and align tools to get them where they need to be...).
Kicad with a constraint solver like freecad's would be a ridiculously huge improvement IMO, but hopefully this is enough to get someone tinkering. Kicad devs if you're reading... pleeeeease. I know it's a lot of work.
I haven't moved to Kicad 7 yet, I don't know how many tutorials have been updated to the latest version.
When Autodesk claim Fusion 360 has the same functionality as Eagle and can replace it, that is a lie. It does not work on Linux so it is not a valid replacement.
Fusion 360 is so slow and bloated it's an embarrassment on Windows. Takes minutes just to start. Loading it in VMware is a joke (my best computer is Ubuntu). I was willing to put up with it for doing 3D board renderings, but no. Not for actual work.
I cannot open an app inside a badly written and slow program with excessive DRM with a subset of the features of the program I've used for 20 years. It's just not happening. I will switch to KiCAD first, it's not nearly as big and uninteresting a transition. If I made MCAD + ECAD stuff more, maybe, but seriously how many people do that. It's a dream. It's super cool when and if it works.
It's like VR though. It has three real use cases -- checking interferences, shifting component positions to address interferences, and making accurate panel cutouts. That's all I've found. The first two are simply enough handled with IDF. Or a STP export from KiCAD which works fine. And a panel cutout can be addressed with a STP export too.
It's cute, Fusion 360, in that it tries to be MCAD, ECAD, etc all in one place. It, like most things of that nature, does badly at all of them. Features should be optional, let me explore MCAD-ECAD integration when I decide it would be an advantage rather than because of software limitations.
https://wiki.freecad.org/KicadStepUp_Workbench
It's been well known internally that it makes an atrocious amount of RPC calls since the Carl Bass days. If I had to make a guess, I'd say that historically most of what you've seen with slow startup relates to authorization more than anything else. You could probably mitmproxy it if you really wanted to, the last time I checked they weren't doing any certificate pinning. Hell, at one point Little Snitch even wanted to know if I wanted to access a staging server.
EAGLE is the first PCB design app I learned (and had a harder onramp than React) so this is sad, but it is important to note that most hobbyists have already switched over to KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/
Dead Comment
In other news, the "free" version of their Fusion 360 loses functionality to the paid version on a regular basis. Wonder if it will suffer a similar fate, or if the free version will end up to forever suffer as some emaciated skeleton of the real app.
Based on what I see in the Chinese electronics communities, pirated Altium seems to be quite popular too.
The big advantage that Altium had for a while was that they were an available, portable format for parts libraries. Everybody was producing and giving away their symbol libraries in Altium format so you could always take whatever design you were given, extract the parts, fix any bugs or weirdness, and get on with life. Since those libraries accompanied the design, you knew those parts symbols had been proven out on at least one real PCB somewhere.
Then Altium went and closed those library formats so that you couldn't tear the parts out anymore. I dropped Altium right then, 100% for KiCad. I had already been doing about a quarter of my designs in KiCad, but I went all in when Altium did that.
https://lwn.net/Articles/924953/
https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-approach-to-software-develop...
When I was into 3D printing 5 years ago I learnt Fusion 360 and it seemed like one of the better free-for-hobbyist tools, but even then it was buggy on Windows (didn't properly support 4K) and features were slowly being moved behind the premium paywall. SketchUp is also quite popular, but people stick to the old version that can be run offline, as the newer web based versions don't have the same features.
I am a huge fan and can easily recommend it.
Maybe in the past, FreeCAD wasnt good, but today its just CAD software. Sure it might not have a wire harness tool that gives you a report about different wires, but I've used enough CATIA to know that CATIA doesnt work either. (maybe hyperbole, but basically Catia tools were so bad, my company ended up writing our own checks).
Bonus points that there is already google indexed support for every question you can imagine. Can't say that about niche Catia stuff.
https://www.kicad.org/donate/
KiCad 5 had just launched, and so I flipped a coin to decide if I should make it in Eagle or Kicad. I ended up choosing KiCad. Looking back five years later, I could not be happier.
Now almost on a monthly basis I hear about Fusion360 receiving some kind of update that strips features away in lieu of running them exclusively in the cloud, or they just arbitrarily change things and make it qualitatively worse for the end user by upselling them features. I don't want anything to do with that and so HP isn't getting a dime of my money.
Has anyone had time to try Horizon and/or LibrePCB and compare them to KiCad?
I paid for a full solidworks license for a year (before discovering the makers license) and grumbled only mildly.
Maybe Assembly, but I can always download the Assembly3 plugin.
Outside of having to download a plugin, FreeCAD has never limited me.
Does that Solidworks makers license still exist? Does it include the CAM stuff for CNC machines?
https://www.solidworks.com/solution/3dexperience-solidworks-...