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Comment by mmac_ | Hacker News Reader

Kicad is the best free EDA I've used and I know many others that use it. The active development and large community make it a no-brainer.

I use Altium professionally ($$$) and I feel like Kicad could cover most of the boards I work on. FYI I've seen a few advanced PCB's done in Kicad successfully - just not sure how much manual calculations/work they had to do.

Kicad + the cheap online PCB vendors are a killer combination.

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Do you have any example(s) of an advanced KiCAD board?

I've made 2 laptops in KiCAD:

https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform

https://source.mnt.re/reform/pocket-reform

This is the most awesome thing I've come across on HN in recent months if not years!

> Made With

> KiCAD EDA > OpenSCAD > LUFA > Autodesk Fusion (Case parts)

This is really awesome. Kudos for KiCAD and OpenSCAD.

That is impressive!

Another example: the HackRF SDR board was done in KiCAD

https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/hackrf

Kicad has a bunch of examples of boards made with Kicad on their homepage.

Tons of stuff on par with a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black, with DRAM, eMMC, and PCIe routing, plus all the fine pitch placements for supporting circuitry. PMICs get dense in these applications.

Here's my OSHW FPGA board made in KiCAD: https://github.com/Fabmicro-LLC/Karnix_ASB-254

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr0pdGuJbXQ

https://github.com/oro-os/link/tree/master/pcb/link-x86-obt

Not the best laid out PCB or the best project structure. But it works, and it's fairly complex.

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