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Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

How to preview? Is it free? What EDA software is used?

Last year’s course indicates this:

> You will need to choose a software tool to complete the activities in this course. Altium Designer, Circuitmaker, Autodesk Eagle, KiCad, and Diptrace will be shown as examples in this course.

Thanks. I couldn't find any info about last year's course. Is it open to preview?

Just opened up the course overview so far. Enter as guest.

KiCad is good and free. The only thing it lacks in comparison with $10k+ offerings is a convenient autorouter. But then again, I couldn't get automated routing to work in Altium either O_O'

Autorouting works in EasyEDA but it still requires supervision. Settings you think would make things better like decreasing the track width can end up creating more vias rather than the other way around.

Well, I worked with altium and kicad for almost 8 years. There are more subtle differences than the autorouter, and this is basically a trivial thing because I rarely use it. For example, kicad does not have some advanced features like via fencing, via picking, lenght matching, and some more. Is true that you could download a third party plugin, but is not the same.

Variants are the same, you cannot do it in kicad and altium is a breeze. It give you the flexibility to build different versión of the board in seconds.

Also, the library management is, in my opinion, very error prone. I get the flexibility and I find it useful in some cases but...

And the last is the design rules UI/UX is very simplistic, and you need to know what you are doing. Which is not bad per se, but for a software oriented to mainly begginers, I think is a bad idea. Besides you cannot import/export rules from one project to another and this is a killer for me.

I hope some day kicad will be a solid competitor to altium but right now I cannot fully do all my work in kicad as a electronics engineer, so even Altium is expensive, is a much needed tool.

Edit: I stand corrected, kicad indeed has lenght matching.

Have you checked out Horizon-EDA? It was built to address some issues with other tools, but it's a newer project so not as far along as KiCAD in other areas.

https://horizon-eda.org/

I dind't know about it but as far as I seen is a well thought out software.

But the main attraction to Kicad is that is a CERN backed software. So has some pedrigree and that pedrigree is needed if you want to sell it to your manager as a backup tool for simpler non critical boards.

That's a great list of differences, and I'd also like to throw in "documentation" to the list of things that Altium does great. Outjob settings plus Draftsman documents mean making changes to even a massive PCB are "one click" away from documentation generation.

True. Generating documentation and more important, a structured documentation, for all projects is another point for Altium.

Another one, much more niche is rigi-flex PCB (stackup, simulation of flex, definition of areas) Is true that I've only done 2 in all this years (and both in the last 2) but altium saved my ass with the wiki and documentation.

I just opened guest access to the course overview. 100% free -- and we'll give parts and boards away to at least 25 people.

We are software agnostic -- you'll be grouped with other users using the same software (group for KiCad, group for Eagle, etc...)

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