Hacker News Reader

Comment by SeasonalEnnui | Hacker News Reader

KiCad is good now. That might seem like a flippant comment however it is indicative of the progress that KiCad has made in the last 3 years. I have moved from a firmly entrenched position with a proprietary EDA (which felt like a pair of comfortable shoes) to KiCad for the majority of projects.

To any KiCad dev reading this - thank you.

View on HN

Until you need to route DDR (or any other parallel bus nets.) Or use any significant amount of impedance control. Or use blind/buried vias. Or tent specific sides of vias.

Kicad is great, but there are very solid use cases that are substantially more painful than other commercial EDA offerings.

I've watched the growth of kicad since 2013. Far more usable now, though it was very poor at the beginning.

In its current state I could recommend it for most hobbyist stuff and some simpler commercial PCBs. Far better than Eagle ever got.

Meanwhile I will continue to use Altium for everything just because I'm fast with it. When time is money and $8k is just another expense it's well worth it.

What’s the issue with blind vias? You had to enable them manually earlier, but as of 7 I think they’re always enabled.

The level of UI polish and control Altium gives you over the construction of HDI vias (and just in general, the properties pane) is substantially greater.

Agreed! The gap is getting smaller, I can imagine feature parity in another few years. Some fellow nerds doing that kind of stuff in $$$-EDA say it isn't exactly smooth sailing in those EDAs - regular crashes and so on.

What kind of projects doesn't need all those things, but yet is still too complex to just do in LibrePCB? To me the nicer and less keyboard driven UI(last I checked, haven't tried KiCAD in years) makes Libre worth it.

Indeed KiCad is much improved in many different areas, and the devs deserve accolades for making those things happen. The self-destruction of EagleCad was certainly a good source of motivation to focus efforts on making something open-source better.

For a number of years I have been using DipTrace for personal projects and it is quite easy to use. It is one of the easiest and fastest tools for doing PCBs for the non-PCB engineer. I have recommended it to a number of non-engineers and they were quickly successful in getting a design up and running.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com