On 02/17/2017 10:21 AM, Kyle Owen wrote:
KiCad has no affiliation to Arduino; in fact, it's being heavily maintained
by CERN. I don't suppose you've had a need to being an Eagle guy, but have
you tried out KiCad before? With the licensing model Eagle has just moved
to, alternatives like KiCad sure seem attractive.
I have a paid license for Protel 99SE, which is a very
powerful, reliable and intuitive (to me, anyway) package.
Maybe intuitive because I've been using it so long. (Too
long??)
Anyway, a guy gave me a design to manufacture made with
KiCad, so I installed it. Well, it certainly is not as
intuitive to ME as Protel, but maybe I just need to use it
more. But, even as of a couple of years ago, it showed a
LOT of promise!
I'm most concerned about the reliability of the design rules
check and layout vs. schematic. If these checks miss
errors, I REALLY don't want to use the package. I know
Protel got it right, in hundreds of board designs, it has
never once let me down. Not totally sure KiCad gives that
level of coverage, so I'm just being cautious. KiCad is
open source, so they can't ever pull the plug on users, or
just go out of business and bury the source code.
But, setting up a virtual machine to run an old Windows
version just so I can run Protel is a bit of a hassle.
KiCad runs on Linux quite well (as well as Windows, too.) I
think with a couple more years of development, KiCad might
be as good as Protel. (KiCad seems to still require picking
operations from a menu, Protel has user-configurable
keyboard shortcuts that are a big help. Maybe KiCad has
that and I just need to learn them.)
Jon
