Unfortunately, using these free tools feels like a throwback to a less developed era in desktop computer aided design. Commercial CAD software with no-cost hobbyist licenses are much more usable, but tie you into their licensing structure and cloud data system. There's no telling whether you'll be able to open your Fusion360 or Onshape projects 10 years from now.
I have a lot of hope that eventually free software will overtake commercial software in a lot of fields, and establish a regime where everyone has access to "professional grade" tools. Something like that exists in the information technology field, and it has unlocked a lot of human potential over the last few decades. Just imagine every school child having access to advanced, professional grade free software tools in every sort of field of human creativity.
I'm not sure the solution.
[2] https://www.freecadweb.org/
[4] http://www.geda-project.org/
[5] http://www.clifford.at/yosys/
[6] https://symbiflow.github.io/
[7] https://www.chisel-lang.org/
It is definitely not lack of features that holds FreeCAD back, though. It is the UI/usability/stability. In fact, I'd prefer a solution WITHOUT cloud features as it's a liability in my profession, and in general ends up putting an expiration date on the program (as eventually servers get turned off, etc).
Again, thank you SO much for your efforts.
For those who don’t know, Blender has developed a few complete animations/shorts with artists and developers working jointly, thus bringing in real world experience to the project.
I wonder if something similar could be done with an open hardware project.
In the short term, I will continue working on KiCad while pursuing as many avenues as possible to generate enough revenue to allow me to continue to work full time on KiCad.
One of my most wanted feature would me to be able to select a trace and get simulated electrical characteristics, like resistance, capacitance, inductance (for example to design a loop antenna, I integrated a few of them in my lastest PCB, for NFC, and had to calculate by hand)...
Of course this is not a small feature but wishing for that says a bit on how good kicad has become, there is very little small feature to wish for as most are here.
however; the interview is really talking about using open software to create your open hardware designs. if you've developed your schematic using proprietary software, then only people who have the same proprietary (paid) software can contribute.
another interesting point they touched on is open instruction sets (e.g. RISC-V). people are developing open hardware platforms with open software solutions but in the middle there is ARM or some other proprietary processor instruction set.
Eagle predates KiCad by a wide margin, iirc. KiCad started in France, Eagle was German (iirc). I think modern Eagle is on Qt, KiCad uses wxWidgets for it's GUI library.
