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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Just a general comment on KiCAD.

I'm honestly impressed that for my applications they have reached feature parity with EAGLE and Altium, both of which are $10k+ per license.

In my opinion their GUI still needs beauty and readability improvements, but they can somewhat compensate by having a great print preview and PDF export. I'm trying to lobby them towards supporting a wider selection of fonts, but that'll realistically take a year to arrive.

But where KiCAD really shines is compatibility. I was feeling rather grumpy after Altium priced me out of being able to open my old design files. But KiCAD could import them almost flawlessly. The only thing I needed to do by hand was to type in clearance constraint rules.

Export to Gerber and fab also worked as expected. Plus their community forum is like 1000x more lively than the beginner forums for Altium and EAGLE.

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Eagle is now Fusion360, and so free for non-commercial or $10k would buy you more than 10y of subscription, I suppose that's debatable whether it's more or less than $10k for one-off perpetual licence, but I suppose I'd suggest if you were paying that much for software you probably also need it newer than 10y old and would've spent it again on a newer version?

You say that as if it a good thing. As a non-commercial user of cad-tools I avoid fusion 360 like the plague.

Now if they had charged a reasonable amount for a license I'd pay but now I see it as a net loss for society. The only goal it serves is to squasch competition and free software.

I just say it as if I consider it positioned between KiCad & Altium.

I'd like to avoid F360, but for 3D modelling it just seems so far ahead of FreeCAD, which still has the frustrations I have with F360 as someone used to working with git anyway; really I just want to learn OpenSCAD or similar well enough.

>> I'd like to avoid F360, but for 3D modelling it just seems so far ahead of FreeCAD, which still has the frustrations I have with F360 as someone used to working with git anyway; really I just want to learn OpenSCAD or similar well enough.

For MCAD give SolveSpace a try - https://solvespace.com/

KiCAD has good compatibility with a very small number of file formats. It needs a LOT of long term work to expand this capabilities.

There are dozens of poorly documented EDA project formats and unfortunately they are usually associated with expensive software. And KiCAD has little support for many of them.

For instance I most recently came across OrCAD, yet another EDA tool I have never even heard about it before, it’s proprietary format locking away design information and thus requiring tedious and error prone reconstruction of what is otherwise a completely open design.

I’ll compare it to Blender, where the support for all but the most ludicrously esoteric formats has been developed and in many cases is still maintained. Sometimes even better than the original tools for the formats were. Blender has done an excellent job of supporting otherwise proprietary formats originally developed for and used by software with a median cost in excess of $1000USD (if not that price per year in some cases).

I don’t expect parity, I’m aware of the challenges and appreciate both the complexity and even the difficulty of getting hold of these files in the first place for reverse engineering. However to call KiCAD’s support for EDA file formats in general “excellent” feels disingenuous. It has excellent support for a few of the most popular formats and very patchy support beyond that.

The Cadence suite of EDA tools (of which OrCAD is one of) is surprisingly popular, but more for its silicon-level and SPICE simulation capabilities. So it seems to be something that should be added to the list, in terms of features for KiCAD...

Some of the EDA file formats are absolutely terrible. My first job out of school was building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_Multisim . As I recall, the file format was quite bad and I doubt anyone would be able to figure out what it meant without sitting in front of the tool, generating a file, then inspecting it.

I'm the creator of the Altium importer in KiCad, and yes, importer development is time consuming but important for people without access to those programs. I even looked into Allegro and reverse-engineered initial bits, but without access to those programs it is practically impossible to write something meaningful. At least for Allegro, you can export to Fabmaster and import it into KiCad.

It's also easier to write importers for the ASCII file format than for the default binary file format, but for the former one the user needs to have access to the proprietary program to export it, which makes them unsuitable for some use-cases.

I’m still paying for Altium. Last time I tried KiCAD I couldn’t assign a net to arbitrary polygons, which is critical for RF work. It still has a ways to go to catch up with Altium, which is $2k/year maintenance.

1) Eagle Premium is a $495/year AutoDesk subscription. (There's a Standard version for $100/year for small boards.)

2) Both Altium and Eagle have nice component libraries, which KiCad has a lot of work to improve.

Software quality and component library quality are a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, Kicad's editors are popular enough and good enough that major vendors (like Digikey [1] and SnapEDA [2]) are offering Kicad footprints for products.

[1]: https://github.com/Digi-Key/digikey-kicad-library [2]: https://www.snapeda.com/

Not to mention supported by PCBA vendors like MacroFab and CircuitHub! It's awesome to be able to upload 2-3 files and have it all auto-generate the PCB's and find the parts.

Kicads problem is not quantity but quality.

There are too many low quality and duplicate models in the standard library.

Does anyone use these in production? I thought most companies of scale had dedicated teams or individuals to act as component librarians because the publicly available footprints are so bad.

They're not technically faulty, just incomplete. Everyone has different, ephemeral needs for purchasing and stocking; as long as your footprint matches what's on the invoice you're fine.

It's been a decade since I've had a problem with a buggy footprint from a default library (contrasted with quite a few buggy footprints I made myself). But just two weeks ago I had a board problem because my selected LED had a slightly different leadframe and pad geometry than the library version. (A '3030' package, comparable to offerings from Cree and Lite-on and Lumileds and - I thought - my LCSC-sourced Everbright.) The stock library footprint was produced in 2016 for a nominally equivalent package from a different manufacturer. When I used one part number in Kicad and bought a different part number, it's obviously my fault. If I worked at a company of scale instead of a company of 20 I'd not be selecting random LCSC part numbers, but that's more so that they'd be confident in their ability to actually buy the thing than because they distrust the stock libraries.

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