I was looking for a comparison with other tools, and "LibrePCB vs. KiCad" in "comparison with other EDA tools" [1] gave some good measure:
"Although LibrePCB has many cool advantages, KiCad is (currently) much more powerful. It has an amazing amount of features which allow to design very complex PCBs. LibrePCB is still a very young software and thus lacks many features needed to design complex PCBs."
"So, if you are looking for an intuitive EDA tool to quickly design a simple PCB, you should give LibrePCB a try. But if you want to design complex PCBs, LibrePCB is probably not (yet) the tool you are looking for."
Their distribution method for Ubuntu is a bit unfortunate, I'm not sure I will install another package manager (flatpak?), give it root access, and then trust an unknown source (flathub?) just to try a software.
I thought there was a debian build, however feel free to post sth to in the github issues, I did so quite a few times already and at times the issue I had was fixed within 24 hours.
Do the skills transfer alright? I'm a complete beginner, so I'd like to start with something simple/easy if I can, but if I'm going to hit a wall and have to start all over later then maybe I should just jump to the harder option.
If you're learning and plan to work in industry, then ask around and use that EDA CAD program if possible. Or ask your university.
KiCad is funded and staffed by CERN, so if you want a free one, I would go with that. All of the free ones have parts catalog issues, so large companies use commercial tools. It has a 3d modeller built in, which is helpful for some projects where packaging geometry matters.
The kinda low-cost commercial electronics CAD program is Eagle, now owned by Autodesk, at $495/year, or free for small boards or educational use, in the cloud.
The high-end commercial products like Altium start at $7k/year, and Orcad is also expensive, depending on options.
If you're doing personal projects that you want to open in 5 years, KiCad is the way to go if you don't want to get out your credit card again.
I used to work with a brilliant computer/electronics designer who did Shuttle payloads. He used graph paper to design computer boards in 10 minutes and said, "the shop can enter it into CAD if they want." meaning they can pull up his old designs and modify those. So that's another way.
I'm an initiate to designing PCBs (and amateur electronics in general). I've been having a great time with KiCad, and would love to know what more seasoned pros would say would be the major difference between KiCad, Eagle, and LibrePCB in a practical sense.
I've used KiCad quite a bit, and enjoy it, but there is an unnecessarily steep learning curve--for example, a good experience depends largely on memorizing key shortcuts. There are also some really unintuitive things related to component libraries (footprints, 3D CAD representations, and schematics) that is kind of a holdover from its "every module does one thing and does one thing well" roots. They've made improvements of late, but it still isn't what I'd call intuitive. I think the future is a more integrated workflow, and I believe that's what I'm seeing in LibrePCB. That said, it's a younger project, and doesn't match up feature for feature yet. I'm thinking about giving LibrePCB a try for tinker projects, and if that goes well, maybe I'll try something bigger :)
All the EDA tools I've ever tried seem to have a very high learning curve. Eagle was the first one I managed to get my head around so I use that but since they they got sold and switched to a subscription model which I hate I wouldn't recommended it if you already know how to use kiCAD and it works for your needs.
I'm kind of in the same boat, and appreciate any advice along these lines. I've designed a fair number of PCB's, but they are all relatively simple analog circuits or carrier boards. I use a lot of ExpressPCB, but of course it's not open source. So I'd love to know what's an easy tool for relatively simplistic boards.
Looking into the future, an interest of mine is to attempt a go-around with an actual board maker, where they receive my design and ship me a manufactured board. So I'd certainly like to try out a tool that will support this.
I have played with LibrePCB before and the user experience is excellent. The file format is also interesting, a lisp-style, human readable text file that can be version-controlled and in some cases compared against other schematics. I also suspect that generating netlists from code (similar to SKIDL for KiCAD) would be quite doable.
My main issue were libraries, even though making footprints is easy enough. Is there a way to import the KiCAD standard library with footprints and symbols here? It would be amazing to have a large, CAD-agnostic component library!
A common parts library supported by multiple EDAs would be nice indeed. But its pretty hard to pull of, since the library organization and styles are quite different between these.
I mean: Importing / exporting the geometry data of footprints and symbols shouldn't be too hard. But one also needs to find a common set of categories, tags, relations between the parts, etc. Otherwise one will end up with a huge library which is impossible to navigate.
Also I would be afraid to just create yet another format which will lead to even more fragmentation.
20 comments
[ 431 ms ] story [ 1415 ms ] thread"Although LibrePCB has many cool advantages, KiCad is (currently) much more powerful. It has an amazing amount of features which allow to design very complex PCBs. LibrePCB is still a very young software and thus lacks many features needed to design complex PCBs."
"So, if you are looking for an intuitive EDA tool to quickly design a simple PCB, you should give LibrePCB a try. But if you want to design complex PCBs, LibrePCB is probably not (yet) the tool you are looking for."
[1] https://librepcb.org/compare/
My goto eda tool these days, the whole way it behaves in UI and how the library is structured is just cool.
Anything without online DRC, differential routing, and length tuning is useless. This looks amazing, thanks for linking to it!
LoRaWAN water temperature sensor: https://github.com/gfroerli/hardware-v2/
Hydro battery charger: https://github.com/ubruhin/hydro-battery-charger
If you're learning and plan to work in industry, then ask around and use that EDA CAD program if possible. Or ask your university.
KiCad is funded and staffed by CERN, so if you want a free one, I would go with that. All of the free ones have parts catalog issues, so large companies use commercial tools. It has a 3d modeller built in, which is helpful for some projects where packaging geometry matters.
The kinda low-cost commercial electronics CAD program is Eagle, now owned by Autodesk, at $495/year, or free for small boards or educational use, in the cloud.
https://www.build-electronic-circuits.com/kicad-vs-eagle-201...
The high-end commercial products like Altium start at $7k/year, and Orcad is also expensive, depending on options.
If you're doing personal projects that you want to open in 5 years, KiCad is the way to go if you don't want to get out your credit card again.
I used to work with a brilliant computer/electronics designer who did Shuttle payloads. He used graph paper to design computer boards in 10 minutes and said, "the shop can enter it into CAD if they want." meaning they can pull up his old designs and modify those. So that's another way.
Looking into the future, an interest of mine is to attempt a go-around with an actual board maker, where they receive my design and ship me a manufactured board. So I'd certainly like to try out a tool that will support this.
Autodesk Eagle - adequate but commercial/cloud now.
LibrePCB - alternative to KiCad if you're ok with a one-man show.
See my comment above for more info.
My main issue were libraries, even though making footprints is easy enough. Is there a way to import the KiCAD standard library with footprints and symbols here? It would be amazing to have a large, CAD-agnostic component library!
Hunting for libraries online takes a lot of efforts.
Embeetle devs once talked of building an online parts library, but I haven't heard of anything coming out of that
I mean: Importing / exporting the geometry data of footprints and symbols shouldn't be too hard. But one also needs to find a common set of categories, tags, relations between the parts, etc. Otherwise one will end up with a huge library which is impossible to navigate.
Also I would be afraid to just create yet another format which will lead to even more fragmentation.
Also, previous HN threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676027
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569969