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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

I was resigned to start the nth project to make a "simple but powerful enough" PCB design tool when I had a second, more indepth look at JLPCB's EasyEDA tool and realized I could actually work it without getting frustrated. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyEDA)

Yes, it's PRC-based, but it's free to use and outputs portable Gerber files. For my hobby (or small-scale commercial) projects it will be fine.

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KiCAD is really quite good and surely good enough that you’d be better off trying and proving that wouldn’t work for you before starting another one.

It has an easy path to Gerber output for PCB manufacturing and a slightly more involved path to JLCPCB PBC manufacturing and SMD assembly.

Starting cold (but with some Eagle experience years ago), I downloaded KiCAD and completed a simple breakout board in a single evening for family Halloween costumes. Ordered them on a Tuesday and had them the next Monday for around $30 for 10 boards.

> but with some Eagle experience years ago

These tools share these very peculiar UX conventions. The fact that you once learned Eagle primed you.

True, which is why I mentioned it, but I was “beyond incompetent” at Eagle and always gave up before finishing even a single design, so while I knew the basics of how PCBs got designed and made, my first commercial PCB ordered was that one and I found KiCAD notably easier.

This is true. But having used both I find Kicad I am constantly saying "ah...what a good way to fix that annoying thing eagle does". Workflow is way better IMHO in Kicad.

Second that. I had limited experience with Eagle and just jumped into Kicad and was amazed at how much easier it was to use. So much less painful. Hotkeys are well defined and logical. Libraries are miles ahead and things like making new footprints is very easy. Ability to add logos and pictures to silk (or copper) easily. A few years ago Kicad was "a decent competitor" and now I believe they are actually way further along than that. Maybe some people who used other tools like Altium can chime in but from what I saw Kicad is amazing...and seems to have a very active dev community. Anyone looking to get into Kicad I recommend watching some of the very well done tutorials on Youtube (I watched "Phil's lab" and "contextual electronics" tutorials in my case).

Chris Gammell’s (Contextual Electonics and KiCon organizer) “Getting to Blinky”[0] is really excellent and my go-to recommendation.

It’s not updated to the latest KiCAD, but it’s still very useful.

[0] - https://youtu.be/BVhWh3AsXQs

That was the one :)

On Phil's lab I watched "KiCad STM32 + USB + Buck Converter PCB Design and JLCPCB Assembly" which is even more in depth and longer...but it missed some tricks which Contextual Electronics had (such as drawing one wire through components in a voltage divider to link all of them).

I recommend watching both...and probably more.

I tried KiCAD, but having used Altium for 26 years, I’m sticking with Altium. KiCAD could not do simple things like assign nets to arbitrary polygons, which is critical for RF layouts. The DRC was really lacking too.

Of course it’s probably great for an open source project, but I don’t know anyone using it professionally. We have 20 Altium license at work, and I have one at home for my consulting business. Even at $2k/year maintenance, that’s cheap compared to the other RF software I use.

The whole problem with free CAD software is you’ll never get the cross discipline skills needed to develop it without paying someone. For example you need an expert at electromagnetics AND scientific programming AND UI design, etc. That’s a full time job, not a hobby. There is a ton of domain specific knowledge.

Yeah...I suspect in certain use cases (especially RF and such) this is a huge difference.

I feel some OS projects though do have the required skillsets and contributors who donate the time to make software worthwhile without payment and I have witnessed people put everything into it as if it was a job...but I do agree it is very easy to put off doing a suggested modification or "trivial to function of the software" type of work when you are not being paid to do so.

Kicad and Freecad have come a very long way in the last couple years from what I see...even with the shortcomings they might still have.

I certainly see them as a Fusion360/Eagle competitor.

I was a big KiCAD fan, until they dropped the autorouter. I had a board I'd designed that was routed with the autorouter, and I wanted to add a resistor. Couldn't do that. Grrr.

"Oh, you should route your board manually" I hear from KiCAD fans. No.

In my quest for a usable PCB design tool easily usable autorouting was a clear requirement - I mean, I had been reading about them since the 80s in electronics mags.

The autorouter in EasyEDA worked quite well for me when testing it. I was able to get it running within a few minutes without spending many hours watching youtube videos.

There is freerouting which interfaces to KiCAD. (It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s also not void.)

https://freerouting.org/freerouting/using-with-kicad

Not quite. [1]

It's become weird. Freerouting apparently isn't repeatable. Run it twice, get a different layout. Ouch. There are lots of forks and tutorials of varying degrees of obsolescence.

[1] https://hackaday.io/page/6082-using-freerouting-with-kicad-5

I don't see any reason to think that auto-routing must/should be deterministic. Auto-routing to me means "I don't care about some detailed aspects of the layout; just make it work with the constraints I gave."

I'm just fine with KiCAD itself, my real difficulty with it comes from importing component footprints and symbols. In most of the other eCAD packages, you can click a button, type a part number and download the symbol/footprint in-app.

In KiCAD, I haven't found any easy way to go about it, you always have to download a ZIP file, extract it, point KiCAD to the new symbol library, point KiCAD to the new footprints and match the footprints to the symbols.

Is there any better way of handling this?

Maybe SnapEDA and their new KiCad plugin [1] would be a good fit for you? I've not used the plugin myself but I do use SnapEDA footprints myself occasionally. I also try and keep on top of all the footprints available on GitHub and add them to our repo [2], you can add this globally and search through it from within KiCad.

1: https://blog.snapeda.com/2020/09/09/introducing-the-snapeda-...

2: https://github.com/kitspace/kicad_footprints

I've ordered boards made with Eagle, KiCAD, and EasyEDA. I'd recommend KiCAD of that list, but the first board I did with it suffered from the bad defaults for mask distances, and none of the fine pitch parts had mask between pins.

It's only a mistake one makes once but having defaults set for 1980s fab capabilities is annoying.

I agree with you, but I don't think I have ever had an EDA tool (proprietary or open source) come with useful defaults. Something has always bitten me.

I normally always run a really simple board through a new process or tool for exactly that reason.

Horizon is developing a good reputation. I haven't tried it yet (I'm a daily Altium user) but keep meaning to give it a whirl.

https://github.com/horizon-eda/horizon

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