Hi Group anybody know of any good (Possibly Free) Electronics CAD, Design and/or simulation programs?
Any Links? Anybody suggest any cheap retail version?
Many Thanks Merlin
- posted
20 years ago
Cad Design
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- posted
20 years ago
EasyPC is excellent:
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Leon
-- Leon Heller, G1HSM Email: aqzf13@dsl.pipex.com My low-cost Philips LPC210x ARM development system: http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller/lpc2104.html
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- posted
20 years ago
Eagle from
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has a free version.
3.1 inch by 3.9 inch max size of PCB for this version
-- Dmitriy Fitisov
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- posted
20 years ago
I just went through this recently and I ended up using Eagle. It is not bad, but it is not a standard windows GUI. So there are a lot of things you will need to learn about some of the basics that are not covered well in the tutorial. But once you come up the learning curve, it is not bad to use.
On the other hand, I had a lot of people say that EasyPC was a much easier to learn program and was also not bad to use. But it is not freeware since the demo is crippled and you can't save any work. I don't see how you can really spend much time learning the tool since you have to start from scratch each time you start the program. I guess you could not turn off your PC for a week or two while you do the eval. But I can't update my anti-virus software with out rebooting :-* I wrote the company about this and they replied that others seem to eval it ok with this limitation.
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20 years ago
Oh! I forgot to mention that there are two news groups that you can get help from. Both are hosted by the makers of Eagle and one is specifically for support contact, the other is a general user group. Both are useful and many of your initial questions will already be answered there; think of it as a FAQ.
Server - news.cadsoft.de Group - eagle.userchat.eng Group - eagle.support.eng
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- posted
20 years ago
I don't see any strength in the argument used to persuade the potential users of EasyPC: "If you are familiar with MS Office, you'll feel familiar with the CAD". In my books, the former and the latter categories of people work in the opposite ends of the corridor. Having used P-CAD somewhat 15 years ago (there was no MS Office then) I saw no trouble to use the interface whatever was. Hey!, and it was very handy to be able to do the work without mouse - not all labs had expensive 386 boxes with 40Mb of disk space, some used XTs ;-)
IMHO the company is off the track here. I started with EasyPC first, evaluated it for several hours, and switched off losing all the work. The next day I've: a) removed EasyPC, b) installed Eagle. No regret since then.
Vadim