Hacker News Reader

Comment by Confiks | Hacker News Reader

I was looking for a comparison with other tools, and "LibrePCB vs. KiCad" in "comparison with other EDA tools" [1] gave some good measure:

"Although LibrePCB has many cool advantages, KiCad is (currently) much more powerful. It has an amazing amount of features which allow to design very complex PCBs. LibrePCB is still a very young software and thus lacks many features needed to design complex PCBs."

"So, if you are looking for an intuitive EDA tool to quickly design a simple PCB, you should give LibrePCB a try. But if you want to design complex PCBs, LibrePCB is probably not (yet) the tool you are looking for."

[1] https://librepcb.org/compare/

View on HN

Just make sure to check out horizon-eda as well: https://horizon-eda.org/

My goto eda tool these days, the whole way it behaves in UI and how the library is structured is just cool.

This tool looks like it has sufficient features to be a real contender.

Anything without online DRC, differential routing, and length tuning is useless. This looks amazing, thanks for linking to it!

Their distribution method for Ubuntu is a bit unfortunate, I'm not sure I will install another package manager (flatpak?), give it root access, and then trust an unknown source (flathub?) just to try a software.

I thought there was a debian build, however feel free to post sth to in the github issues, I did so quite a few times already and at times the issue I had was fixed within 24 hours.

It's up to each distro to package things. You could probably open a package request with Ubuntu. I've done this for Guix and Nix many times.

Discussion of Horizon on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23062174

In case you'd like to know what's possible so far, here are two fairly simple but non-trivial projects made with LibrePCB:

LoRaWAN water temperature sensor: https://github.com/gfroerli/hardware-v2/

Hydro battery charger: https://github.com/ubruhin/hydro-battery-charger

There is also https://librepcb.discourse.group/t/projects-madewithlibrepcb... which shows a few projects made with LibrePCB.

Do the skills transfer alright? I'm a complete beginner, so I'd like to start with something simple/easy if I can, but if I'm going to hit a wall and have to start all over later then maybe I should just jump to the harder option.

I'll talk exclusively about EDA ...

If you're learning and plan to work in industry, then ask around and use that EDA CAD program if possible. Or ask your university.

KiCad is funded and staffed by CERN, so if you want a free one, I would go with that. All of the free ones have parts catalog issues, so large companies use commercial tools. It has a 3d modeller built in, which is helpful for some projects where packaging geometry matters.

The kinda low-cost commercial electronics CAD program is Eagle, now owned by Autodesk, at $495/year, or free for small boards or educational use, in the cloud.

https://www.build-electronic-circuits.com/kicad-vs-eagle-201...

The high-end commercial products like Altium start at $7k/year, and Orcad is also expensive, depending on options.

If you're doing personal projects that you want to open in 5 years, KiCad is the way to go if you don't want to get out your credit card again.

I used to work with a brilliant computer/electronics designer who did Shuttle payloads. He used graph paper to design computer boards in 10 minutes and said, "the shop can enter it into CAD if they want." meaning they can pull up his old designs and modify those. So that's another way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com