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Comment by Ccecil | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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