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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

Are these mature already? It took some time for KiCad to get to current usable state and I don’t want to be early adopter. In fact, I want to have my private hardware MVP next year with current tools. On the other hand I can’t imagine my slacker colleagues using anything else than Vivado. Learning Vivado for them was already mission impossible.

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I wouldn't say KiCad is usable yet. I've made multiple attempts to use it and it just is fundamentally user hostile. Unfortunately the devs see any attempt to improve user friendliness as "dumbing down".

Fortunately there is (finally!) an open source PCB design program that doesn't suck: Horizon EDA. I've only made one PCB with it but honestly it was pretty great and the author fixed every usability bug I reported in a matter of hours, which is an insane difference from KiCad's "you're holding it wrong".

The only think I don't like about it is it has an unnecessarily powerful and confusing component system (there are modules, entities, gates, etc.). But really it is the best by far.

Anyway, on FPGAs, I think the tools are only vaguely mature for iCE40 and even then you basically need to already be an expert unfortunately.

What have you found wrong with KiCad?

I've only recently starting designing PCBs and I started with KiCad, but I've found it to be very easy to use after watching one video of someone going through a simple board design.

So many things. It was a few years ago that I tried so I don't remember the specifics but it's just generally very unintuitive and makes questionable UI choices. E.g. when you move a component in the schematic the wires don't stay attached to it.

I didn't need a video to figure out how to use Horizon.

Have you tried LibrePCB? https://librepcb.org/

I actually haven't yet - that does look quite good! Will definitely check it out next time I do a PCB.

Thank you, I’ll look at it. Last time I wasn’t happy about KiCad’s differential lines. My design was space constrained and it was really hard to match lengths of short traces.

Last time I used KiCad the UX itself was fine although it was totally lacking polish but the parts management was absolutely atrocious.

Parts management is a pretty significant part of the UX I would have said!

I have yet to design a PCB where I didn't have to create basically all of the components myself.

It is still in dev but I think it is way more usable than the Xilinx tools I guess.

I am curious to know if you are using Qemu by any chance to prototype your hardware. I am doing some work on Qemu to make prototyping easier of a custom hardware and would love the pain points.

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