Yeah, trying to learn KiCad is worse than learning Blender. If JLCPcb made a simple online editor that sourced from available parts and integrated directly with their store they'd be running out of banks to put their money into.
I dunno. I've used others, and KiCad was no harder to start with than the others (Horizon, LibrePCB, Lepton/gEDA, some others I forgot).
I asked for recommendations a week ago on HN for EDA products, and tried them all.
You know which one I eventually settled on? The one with the most components (symbols + footprints).
Turns out, features are nice (rules checker, etc) but not having to f*&^ing create my own symbols for a mass-produced part, then design the footprint for the same part is a huge timesaver.[1]
For many of us non-professionals designing a board, the UI just isn't as big of an issue as having to create our own components.
[1] At any reasonable hourly rate, having to create a library of just 1 component costs more than whatever you think you'll save with a slicker UI.
On top of that semiconductor vendors don't want to hire people to draw symbols in every possible cad solution.
So you instead have them release symbols in some preferred tool, maybe they also outsource to third party services like UltraLibrarian. There problem with the third party services is they do the laziest conversions possible between format using scripting and often do a horrible job.
This doesn't really explain why creators of new CAD programs (Horizon and LibrePCB are new) invent new data formats.
We've seen time and time again, in every digital domain ever invented, that the most important thing is the dataset.
It doesn't really matter how nice the library manager is if what it manages has limited availability - and no, asking for a community to pitch in and help with the duplicated work is not a solution.
The solution is to pick the largest library and use its format.
We currently support components on JLC, but eventually plan to build out a pretty substantial library. We will also capture a good fraction of information that you would currently need to go to the datasheet for.
Anyway, my 2c worth:
1.
> In our tool, just give it a part number and it will find and download the footprint and create an ato file for the component.
I don't think this is scalable (although, for my use, probably sufficient). There are just too many parts that are in existence, and the rate of new part creation is probably higher per day than your staff and/or community can handle.
It's fixable if you have plugins for each EDA tool's format (KiCad, Eagle, etc).
2. I'm very surprised at the language used - it's very unlike what is normally used (s-expressions) in EDA. Lisp-like languages tend to be highly used in CAD applications, so it would clear a lot up if you were to explain what the advantages ato are over a minimal Lisp-like language.
3. The dependency list (in terms of knowledge required) is a dealbreaker for me[1]. I need to know how to manage Python environments, the ato language and YAML?
Since all of the constructs in all of those languages are a subset of (or can be represented by) s-expressions, perhaps it would have been best if you switched to s-expressions only. Then a) there's only one language to learn, b) that language is already syntax-highlighted and c) it's flexible enough for any future features you want to add in (rules definition, rules-checkers, etc).
From what I can see here and now, the ato language would have to see significant changes if it needs to be used for some serious stuff.
Sorry for the negativity, but I wish you all the luck nevertheless.
[1] I looked for a download link, couldn't find one, read a few of the installation instructions, then gave up.
Not personally a fan of the readability of lisp, but that is just a personal preference. Our assumption is that python is going to be the most familiar language to our users and following a python like syntax will make picking it up easy. Our language is definately still quite immature and we are still figuring out exactly what it should look like.
There is definitely a little bit of a learning curve at the moment, we do have some getting started videos that walk you through the whole process. If there is anything missing or confusing, please point it out! We do want to make it as approachable as possible. It will only get better from here, I promise!
On the downloading, currently we have the package on pypi, which does make it pretty easy to install from a command line, but I can appreciate that will be new to alot of people. In the future we might do an executable download version.
We have a getting started video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aeZLlA_VYA
We are very active on discord also if you get stuck or have any questions/feedback, hope to see you there! https://discord.gg/PBq4pS4K3p
For us hobbyists there's no point in investing years learning something proper like Altium because we won't ever be shipping to production or doing stupidly complex multilayer boards. We need the Tinkercad for PCBs, not Fusion360. Something that can be crude and oversimplified, but quick to use and also simple enough that even middle schoolers can learn it.
hope it works for you!