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Let me present a counter-opinion. I found KiCad to be surprisingly useful, not for super-complex boards, but for significantly more than just the simplest of projects (I'm using it for four-layer boards with controlled impedance tracks and differential pairs).

Yes, there are bugs and annoyances. But not enough to shell out 6kEUR or so for the next step up in EDA tools (which would be Altium Designer, and I'm not even mentioning the maintenance fees, just the initial payment). For our business it simply doesn't make sense to spend that money given how well KiCad does its job.

Going into details — I only use the OpenGL mode, ever (because of the push&shove router). These are the things I would like fixed/improved:

— copper plane handling: copper planes from different nets do not avoid each other, which should be considered a bug,

— push&shove router will happily push around my carefully placed differential pairs, breaking their alignment, and NOT TELL ME ABOUT IT (the last part is the worst),

— DRC doesn't check diff pairs,

— I'd like to see easier via stitching.

The rest are inconveniences, which every CAD package has.

Also, most of this discussion focuses on PCB design. It is worth mentioning that the schematic drawing is pretty well done, and the resulting schematics look good. Also, the idea of associating footprints separately from schematic symbols is a very good one and lets me reuse footprints better.

Overall, I found KiCad to be perfectly suitable for nearly all hobby projects, and very capable for professional work, although with some caveats, and not for everything out there. I think I would not try to use it to route high-speed boards with more than 6 layers.

Let's also look at this from a different perspective: these days, as a hobbyist, I can simply start DOING electronics and easily get to 4-layer controlled impedance designs. Given the wonderful chips that are available these days and the availability of services like OSHpark and OSHstencils, this means you can really do impressive stuff, without spending anything on EDA tools. The upfront start-up cost is zero. This is fantastic and is a great achievement of the KiCad team. I am very grateful for that.

I basically agree with everything you said, and I don't think we contradict each other. If I were to start an electronics company today, I would almost certainly choose KiCad and use it until I had some serious revenue.

But if demanding electronics are your bread and butter and you have several million Euro revenue per year, saving a couple thousand Euro in license fees by not having a professional EDA tool is hard to justify. KiCad just isn't there yet, though it might be in a few years.

Probably my biggest annoyance with OpenGL mode is that it completely changes the UI logic form standard mode (arguably it makes the interface more Windows-like, or probably Altium-like). The standard mode UI is weird but surprisingly usable so I tend to do most of the layout work in standard mode and only switch to OpenGL to use push-and-shove to avoid major ripup-and-reroute cases and for diff-pairs/length matching.

What do you need the standard mode for? Serious question — I actually never used it, I only stay in OpenGL mode, so I don't know what I'm missing?

> But not enough to shell out 6kEUR or so for the next step up in EDA tools (which would be Altium Designer, and I'm not even mentioning the maintenance fees, just the initial payment).

These days Altium have both CircuitMaker, which is free with limitations, and CircuitStudio which is like 900€.

> Our conclusion was that for hobby projects and very simple professional PCBs, KiCad is a great tool, but it's just not enough for even slightly demanding projects (and I'm not even talking about high-frequency design, EMI analysis, and multi-person projects).

You are entitled to your opinion, and surely there are more advanced tools, but lots of people do high-frequency design using Kicad. HackRF, from Michael Ossman, is a SDR board entirely built in Kicad [1].

Heck, I've done nice, complex high-density, high-speed FPGA-based boards in Kicad. It's still not at the high leagues, but I wouldn't dismiss it as only an option for hobbyists and simple PCBs. I, personally, find it much better than Eagle, and I'm not the only one.

[1] https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/

I'm not sure I'd hold up Eagle high as a bar to beat.

Eagle may not be a high bar to beat but it is a commercial product that in my experience KiCAD has exceeded.

It surely isn't, but is a commercial product that get much less heat then Kicad.

Can you respond to the specific criticisms of OP then?

Not every discussion has a winner and I'm not Kicad's lawyer. I'm just honestly adding to the discussion, not trying to "win" a debate or anything.

That was not what I was inferring, I was just geniously interested in counterpoints.

I didn't say that it's impossible to do these things in KiCad, it's rather that KiCad doesn't offer a lot of assistance for those scenarios. In the extreme case, you can design your PCB by hand-writing the Gerber files, but the point of an EDA tool is that it should handle the automatable stuff.

I agree that it has wide room for improvements, but I still find it very comparable to Eagle, for example.

But it is in a steady improvement route, while operating in a much harder segment to attract the resources they need than most free/open-source projects: their best users aren't high-level programmers, neither UX experts, and UX experts and high-level programmers aren't their typical users[1].

I still use Altium for my most complex designs, even for reasons beyong those you've posted, but it surely can be used for professional projects beyond the simplest ones, even taking advantage of the automation by learning a few simple patterns.

[1] Except, of course, by coincidence. As a primarily hardware engineer, I'm trying to help by re-learning desktop programming, something I haven't done in years.

> The developers seem to prefer working on interesting new features like the push-and-shove router, instead of fixing the basics

Yeah, that's the problem with several open-source products. But the boring parts are needed a lot of times

Also the usability aspects that were mentioned and several open-source projects suffer from it (and whenever someone tries to fix it is usually shunned)

How many projects across CERN do you think would use KiCad if it were somewhat knocked shape?

Going OT but staying on this theme: It seems likely that public money across many governments is spent on closed source software for circuit design. Even probably across the projects in a single developed country I imagine it might be an economy to pay for the software to be modified. Such changes then being a gift to society at large.

What do electronic engineering students use at present - presumably a range of CAD systems, but is KiCad up there?

Academics (in the UK) is there any effort towards making free-libre software available through collaboration of different institutes?

> "Academics (in the UK) is there any effort towards making free-libre software available through collaboration of different institutes?"

I don't work in that field, so I can't answer your question directly, but I can pass on that EAGLE, which is probably KiCad's closest competitor, is available for free for academic institutions:

https://cadsoft.io/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAGLE_(program)

I recently did a short electronics course (I made a PIC-based board from surface mount electronics! Without sneezing!), and we did the PCB design stage in EAGLE, and it was basically buggy as hell. We were recommend to keep saving in case it crashed (it did), and if bits of our design appeared to mysteriously vanish, we should change the zoom level to see if they came back, due to render bugs...

They also suggested EasyEDA:

https://easyeda.com/editor

...which is a free online PCB layout program. I played with it for about five minutes but not much more than that. It's got an autorouter but I haven't found an autoplacer tool (although EAGLE didn't have one either).

Anyone know this? Is it any good?

EAGLE is terrible. It is not only bizarre and unnecessarily complex, but also buggy. It is free, but only for the smallest of projects, and if you get to a certain board size or a number of layers, it suddenly becomes quite expensive.

In my opinion, KiCad is already better than EAGLE even not taking the price into account.

I work in the field (another particle accelerator) and I'll tell you outright that a non-commercial license is a no-no for research institutes.

We MUST be able to license the project for commercial parties to produce them, lest we have to support the project for its entire life-cycle, which can be decades. Also, a non-commercial license restrict sharing between labs, or even use for some entities that work as government contractors.

> "I'll tell you outright that a non-commercial license is a no-no for research institutes."

That makes no sense. Software licencing and product support are two completely different factors. You can have software support agreements with open-source software, that's how companies like Red Hat and Canonical make their money.

I assure you it makes a lot of sense and is practiced by several labs from around the world.

Hardware is not software - you don't simply compile it in your computer. You don't pay other company to just do just give support to you: you license to them so they can tweak it, manufacture, and sell the hardware to you and other research labs.

> Also, a non-commercial license restrict sharing between labs, or even use for some entities that work as government contractors.

That is one of the more bizarre things I've read here. You are saying an licence whose terms explicit permit copying for free are worse at sharing than licences that forbid it doing sharing it, ever.

> You don't pay other company to just do just give support to you: you license to them so they can tweak it, manufacture, and sell the hardware to you and other research labs.

That's just weird. The people who maintain my car didn't make it, the people who supply me my email didn't design it, the people who run my government don't own it. All the software I run has security patches supplied within hours, for free, by people who didn't write it and don't own it. And yes, they are faster and break less than their commercial "upgrade to the new version" counterparts.

You and your labs live in an alternate universe to me, my friend.

Yes, I live in the high-complexity, low-volume hardware universe. Quite different from cars and software.

> "You don't pay other company to just do just give support to you: you license to them so they can tweak it"

Open-source support companies can still tweak the software for you, and are free to do so because of the permissive licences.

Take a look at the business model section of Red Hat's Wikipedia page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat

Does this definitely extend to UK academics? They mention a .edu address is required, and I didn't hear back after applying with a .ac.uk address.

I assumed it did, but perhaps it doesn't.

> Preemptive reply to "why don't you contribute to it?": We thought about donating to the project, but the amount of money we spend on professional EDA tools per year would only buy us about 10 day of KiCad developer time (or in-house developer time) – by far not enough to fix all show-stoppers.

I’m not sure I follow. Are you saying you chose to not donate at all because you think your donation wouldn’t make any difference? In my experience, for many FOSS project standards, any contribution that can buy even a day of developer time would be considered huge. I’m sure KiCad would welcome any amount of donation :).

No, that's not what was being said.

The options on the table are:

1. Pay the licencing fees for proprietary software that already does what you want it to do.

2. Sponsor development of an open-source project so that it will eventually do what you want it to do.

The argument being made is that, in the case of KiCad and this particular institution, option 1 was seen to be cheaper than option 2. In other words, it was deemed to be cheaper to pay the licence costs for the proprietary solution than it would be to pay a developer to make KiCad fit in with what they wanted.

it sounds like they'd be happy donating some amount comparable to the cost of current tools if the donations would result in the project being made usable for them.

it's not about it making a difference or not to the project, it's about it resulting in a sufficiently improved tool that they can use and get some ROI on

Solution is dominant assurance contracts, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_as...

How would that work in practice in this case? Note that the contract would most likely be with an individual developer, not the project itself.

I also did some review of many EDA tools. Sadly, KiCad is absolutely the worst I've tried in terms of UX. I guess many's favorites are Altium Designer. I just hope there is one Open Source solution that is similar to Alitum Designer. What they charge is restricting innovation from happening.

>I just hope there is one Open Source solution that is similar to Alitum Designer.

There almost assuredly isn't. I've looked far and wide for such a piece of software and have been unable to find it, and and EDA being such a huge software endeavor, I doubt there is some guy in some corner of the internet working hard on a full featured EDA that just hasn't been "noticed" yet.

I wonder if their approach can be simulated without being sued for a.patent infringement.

That sounds like a list of the bugs from some commercial ECAD software I've used in the past.

Anyone remember PADS2000? Die die die!

Most of your post is Greek: tracks, vias, copper zones. I'm not sure how anyone can make an abstract design for an entire circuit board from scratch, it how to put one together.

This is Hacker News. Some knowledge of hardware is expected.

But I'll describe KiCad's workflow.

First, you draw a schematic diagram. This has blocks and symbols for all the components. You place part symbols, which come from a library. Part symbols have a reference ID such as "R15", which you have to set, and you can also set such information as the actual part number in a catalog, which will be used later. The part symbols library has most standard components, but you'll probably have to draw some symbols of your own. There's a draw program for drawing symbols for new components. (The schematic editor is OK, but the symbol drawing program is a crappy draw program.)

Then you run the design rule checker. This tells you if you forgot to connect a pin, or connected two outputs together. It's sort of like "lint" for schematics. It doesn't know anything about electronics; it's just a topology check.

Then you run a spreadsheet-like program which, for each part, assigns a "footprint" to that part. The "footprint" is the pattern of copper pads and holes on the PC board where that part goes. Many schematic symbols map to one footprint - all 8-pin SOIC-form packages have the same footprint, for example. Sometimes you need to add a new footprint, and there's a draw program for that, different from the schematic draw program. (It's a crappy draw program.)

After that, you click the "NET" icon, and the schematic program generates a netlist. This is a text file with just the part info and wiring topology. You can also get out a bill of materials (BOM) file at this point, for ordering parts.

Now PC board design begins. This is a separate program. You start by importing the netlist. There can be errors at this point - missing footprints and such. You may have to go back to the schematic editor. You can keep both open at once, change the schematic, and generate a new netlist.

At this point, you have a display showing all the parts spread out more or less randomly (there's an auto-place function which does this, not very well), with lines showing where connections are needed. The lines are just straight lines between things that need to be connected, not useful printed circuit board traces. This is called a "rat's nest". Now you drag parts around until you have a workable parts layout. (Some parts need to be close to other parts for electronics reasons. You may want connectors and such in specific places.)

Then comes connecting up the parts. There's an automatic routing program for this, but it's not very good. (That's what you pay the big bucks for in the high-end EDA systems.) Mostly you draw tracks of copper to connect up parts on the various board layers, and use vias, connecting holes through the board, to connect through layers. This is manual, but the program checks you - you can only connect things that the netlist says should be connected. The program won't let you make a wrong connection. There's also a design rule checker for clearances between wires and such. This is a slow, fussy process. Squeezing in all the tracks can be tough, and previous tracks may have to be moved. The tighter you design your board, the harder this is.

Once everything is connected properly, and the design rule checker says there are no problems, you generate "Gerber files" for each board layer, and a "drill file" which defines where holes go. These are industry-standard files. You send them to a board design service and boards come back in a few days. They're made by photo-etching and CNC drilling, and while it's possible to do this yourself, it's not worth the trouble because custom board fab runs now start around $21.

So that's how you make a basic PC board with KiCAD.

Forget about the terminology for a second.

If you want to get a general understanding of circuit design, think about it in terms of connecting points. The London tube network is a good analogy for this. When starting out designing a circuit, you think only of which points need to be joined together. This is similar to the simplified tube map that many people are familiar with:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/travel/downloads/tube_map.html

However, that map only represents a simplified version. The real geographical map looks more like this (this is still simplified as it doesn't show information about the height/depth of the tracks):

http://www.tubemapcentral.com/mythset/geomap.jpg

It's the same with circuit design. You start off with a simplified version, but the physical version is frequently more complicated because you have to work over multiple 'layers' in order to stop wires that cross over each other that shouldn't be connected from touching each other. That's where things like 'vias' come into play (vias are the points at which layers of a circuit board are connected to each other).

> Most of your post is Greek: tracks, vias, copper zones. I'm not sure how anyone can make an abstract design for an entire circuit board from scratch, it how to put one together.

I do not understand what you're trying to say.

(Comment moved up in tree as requested.)

Well, I do know a Greek guy who has done some PCB design...

https://www.stavros.io/posts/emergency-food-button/