Melting KiCad (opens in new tab)

> which results in unusual looking PCBs

I really love things like this that break the non-technical cargo-cultish norms in a technical field. There's no electrical reason to wiggle wires around at 45 degrees, but you're looked down upon and made to feel bad if you don't. Technically, it just add parasitics.

One could claim "it's pride/art", well why constrain yourself to 45 degree lines if you're making art!?

I thought about how lazy I am and how difficult and a pain in the ass it is to design a schematic, how annoying it is to pick components and make sure they are properly rated. Routing is almost trivial except for some of the tricky high frequency and analog stuff.

I would prefer some sort of "Smart EDA" that automatically understands that I want to place a switch mode power supply with X constraints here, then automatically rates resistors, capacitors, inductors, mosfets, etc and automatically picks manufactured components from mouser. I could get behind that. If the software does that part I will gladly do component placement and routing myself!

mitxela discusses topor in the video. i used topoR in the past. it has does have import-export options from many EDAs, here its imported from eagle. here is a gif of it at work. http://i.imgur.com/66S5KMv.gif

TopoR is excellent... And the only auto router I found to actually work. I use it along with Diptrace (which is also Russian developed).

I wonder how it works? I imagine some sort of hill-climbing search method, simulated annealing perhaps?

“Topor” also means axe/hatchet in Russian

I wonder if you have used 6.x?

As soon as 6.0 was released we switched all future work to KiCad from Altium Designer. This after held licenses for AD going back to P-CAD days (2006, if I remember correctly) and previously using OrCAD and other professional tools. In short, I got sick and tired of sending thousands of dollars per year to Altium for them to burn the cash adding cloud-based functionality nobody I know wants at all. As a result, AD is just piled-on with bugs, issues, inconsistencies and you can pretty much expect every single update to deliver new bugs.

Anyhow, we've done several boards with KiCAD. We are not sorry at all that we made the change. Sure, it could be improved. The good news is, it will. Also, we are happy to financially contribute towards KiCad development because we know it will not go towards bullshit designed to try to sell the company to a larger company (Altium tried to attract Autodesk, and failed --ADSK probably saw the mess AD had become and backed away).

Anyhow, I think KiCad is good for probably 95%, if not 99%, of any board anyone might want to design. I go back to the early 80's for PCB design, which means that I have done some pretty advanced boards with tools that were far more primitive than KiCad.

As a side note, being able to use Python to drive aspects of KiCad is awesome. We've already created a number of useful utilities relevant to our work.

I have to say KiCad 6 is much nicer, since Pcbnew and Eeschema finally have the same UI. Having made a lot of mistakes on my first "big" design, resulting in multiple redraws, I actually find KiCad quite usable.

LibrePCB sadly doesn't have hierarhical schematics, and they've saved me a lot of time and effort. I hear Horizon EDA now has them, though, I'll have to try it.

I recently did my first KiCad project and found it to be quite cool. Most of my previous experience was 10+ years ago with Orcad and whatever free EDA tools were around then, so I'm not up to date regarding KiCad's competition but I didn't find much to complain about. The issues I had were quickly resolved with a rich assortment of how-to videos and tutorials.

I had to make a part using KiCad as well, and even that process was straightforward. I'm excited to work on my next layout project now after having used it. Bonus points for the 3D rendering mode which worked spectacularly on Ubuntu out of the box. It was very handy to visualize the finished board before assembly.

I'm tempted to give it a try. I've been using ExpressPCB at work, and something called FreePCB at home. The boards that I make at home tend to be simple 2-layer analog circuits.

I tried KiCad, and it seems like just getting to the starting point of beginning to route a PCB requires an enormous amount of sheer physical labor that left me with an eyestrain headache.

I'm glad we've got engineers to do this work, but I also kind of pity them, and have gained a better understanding of why projects take so long. I get it that at the end of the day, they need to be able to push a button and have a finished PCB stuffed with parts drop out of an automated machine in China. But I don't, and I think that for folks like hobbyists and hackers, going directly from a hand drawn schematic to manual layout in a simple PCB editor may still be the winning ticket.

In ease of use KiCad seems to be on par with pads, orcad, altium, etc. Not all that different. It just lacks a lot of features.

I don't think making your own parts is really a downside... For any commercial application actually making the part footprints is such a small part of the total engineering effort required for supply chain management. On top of that, it is important to really understand every pin!

I use Horizon EDA and it's really nice.

I thought I wanted/needed this too when doing my first design. Having a few under my belt now, I firmly believe it would be more of a problem than not.

Automatic placement/routing would become a crutch that would prevent folks from learning what actually is necessary to design a half-decent PCB.

Folks that need auto-routing won't be aware/skilled enough to notice and fix problems before sending the design off to be fab'ed, and then will spend unnecessary amounts of time debugging a broken board only to learn what they should have before sending it off... or will grow frustrated and think the software sucks or something.

There's a lot more to PCB design than just connecting nets together, and skipping the step where you learn how to do it properly would be like refusing to learn to code and instead only want to use no-code UI widgets. It will bite you hard one day and you will lack the skillset to know why.

Besides that... auto-placement is really an impossible task, even for the "big guys" like Altium. The editor cannot possibly know what's inside the component's data sheet, or infer best practices etc. Things like this one particular switching boost converter chip requires a capacitor on the output no further than 0.2" away... etc. So any auto-placement or auto-route feature will be half-baked at it's best, even if done well.

Automatic place and route on the board level is a neat problem to think about, but the practical usefulness is somewhat questionable. For 6U eurocard sized boards with sea of random MHz-ish SSI/MSI logic it makes some kind of sense, but who does that today. The board is either going to be so simple, that the placement and routing is obvious or so complex, that just even capturing all the constraints is more work than doing the layout mostly manually.

I was able to autoroute several years ago.

I recently just finished a custom PCB art piece -> https://www.behance.net/gallery/137418457/NGC-2336

It was an interesting learning experience that brought me much closer to being able to create functional PCBs. The 45° angled traces however are just such a part of the classic aesthetic it's hard to go for something else. I'll definitely try some more exotic ones in the future.

The Boldport kits were designed with PCBmod-e (https://pcbmode.com/), which was created by Boldport's founder Saar Drimer.

It seems all of it is sold out. But yes, looks marvelous on the pictures.

To elaborate, you specify design rules for your PCB design and layout based off what your chosen fabrication company's abilities are. Each company's fab process is slightly different and will have varying requirements or specifications you must meet in order to have a successfully produced board.

Things like minimum/maximum trace widths, minimum/maximum via size, via types (buried, blind, tented, etc), pad size, solder mask tolerances, component separation distances, etc.

This often means you need to choose a fab before you design your board... and changing to a different fab later on might mean you have to redesign part/all of your board (particularly if you are pushing tolerances). Each fab has different abilities and requirements.

Tape didn't really like to bend (at least not the stuff I used when I dabbled in old school layout 20+ years ago), for the same reason cars need differentials.

Markers, on the other hand... markers were perfect for that.

I think that's right. I found some envelopes at work with design documents for similar looking boards, and that's how they were made. Drawn on paper, laid out on clear film with tape and adhesive transfer pads, and photographically reduced for etching. One of the envelopes even includes a roll of punched paper tape, which I assume is the drill NC program. I've since re-created the boards in KiCAD, but I hung onto the old documents because they're such neat historical artifacts.

You should try some other alternatives Eagle is really really bad and KiCAD is quite bad.

Horizon EDA is decent and I've heard good things about LibrePCB but not tried it.

DesignSpark PCB is also a fairly reasonable option. Certainly better than Eagle and a better UX than KiCAD. Not open source, but not limited in any way like most commercial options are.

Etching masks are usually digitally printed; they shouldn't care about the shape of the traces.

Good news. KiCad 6.0 now comes with a Plug-in Manager.