[chbot] Eagle layout

[Volker Kuhlmann]

On Wed 26 Feb 2014 12:05:35 NZDT +1300, Jasper Mackenzie wrote:

> In the arena of hobbyists style eda, I have just started with Kicad, which
> like everything foss has its idiosyncracies, yet I suspect will be better
> in the long run as it is full featured, not crippled and... GPL!

I can never make up my mind whether to start something with eagle or
kicad.

eagle is far more common, more polished, and has a huge number of public
libraries available, especially for arduino projects, and is crippled in
the free version.

kicad is FOSS, comes as an integrated system with gerber viewer,
interfaces to circuit simulation (spice), and gets better all the time.
The lack of component libraries may not be that much of downside,
because often the components are not up to scratch (schematic symbol,
footprint, pin definitions) and needs changing anyway. Redrawing
a component in kicad from an eagle part should not take too long.

Fritzing isn't really that far advanced; its feature of making 3D
visualisations of the breadboard is a gimmick, and drawing schematics
with it is simply not fit for purpose (the SVG rendering is unusably
slow). That's why all of the project only have a PCB layout done with
it. Both eagle and kicad are superior with that.

None will do 3D visualisations of PCBs with components.

Is anyone actually using auto-routers? I never got much use out of them
because they leave things in a mess, and the remaining 5% tracks are
never routable (that's why the auto-router gave up!), so what's the
point.

I will not touch that designspark stuff. Yuck.

Volker

-- 
Volker Kuhlmann
http://volker.top.geek.nz/	Please do not CC list postings to me.