Board Design

Try ExpressPCB's free software.

It's very intuitive.

Graham

ExpressPCB / PCB123 / Pad2Pad are all lock-in-ware. Their output can only be used with a single fab house. They don't produce gerbers. Printing out what you need is a bitch.

KiCAD (useable under Windoze) has already been mentioned. It is the antithesis of the wares above. It is open source (gratis and libre). There are no forced artificial limitations.

gEDA (also previously mentioned) is the same for Linux/Unix. (KiCAD also has Unix and Mac ports.)

The demo version of Cadsoft EAGLE can do 3" x 4" 2-sided *non-commercial* PCBs.

I thought ExpressPCB will sell you the Gerbers for $60 or something like that?

And PCB123 will give you the Gerbers after you pay them to build your protos?

It (and gEDA) tend to have a somewhat steeper learning curve than Express PCB's package, though. Places like ExpressPCB survive for the same reason that 7-11 does: Sometimes you want quick and easy, even if it costs noticeably more.

Joel Koltner wrote:

My understanding is similar. If you get it right the 1st time and never alter the PCB, this could work. Using their software to change the design later means you have to jump thru the hoop again. No, thanks.

You pays your money and you takes your choice. (All $0 initially.) Those folks who don't know what "Gerber" means may have unpleasant surprizes down the road. Joerg touched on lock-in-ware and scaling up in this thread.

Yup. It takes all kinds to make a world. There are "easy" girls as well. They aren't necessarily the ones you want to marry.

Fair enough.

Yeah, although to him I'd say that -- at least for small, simple boards like the one the O.P. is discussing -- finding that, crap!, you used lock-in ware and end up having to re-enter the schematic into a different/better tool is going to comsume a miniscule amount of funding & effort relative to getting the thing in production anyway.

But I am all for trying to help people know what they're getting themselves into, and your post is definitely helpful is that regard.

Yeah, but few people want to get married without having gone on plenty of dates with those easy girls first. :-)

As far as marriage goes, stuff like Eagle and Pulsonix are still quite easy on the wallet anyway. It's things like ORCAD that's a nasty-looking made-up lady who's going to want breast augmentations, facelifts, and a new car every time you turn around and still won't be nearly as good to you as that girl your knew next door in high school. A marraige to ORCAD very much should end in divorce for any self-respecting fellow!

---Joel

True. If he wants something fast, anything is ok. Re-entering a schematic is easy, my layouter has to do that most of the time because our systems aren't compatible. It's done in a jiffy because his version doesn't have to become "publish-pretty". Transcribing a layout will be a major bear though. The sheer amount of work making package models is going to frustrate. At least for me because in the analog world there are lots of rather weird parts that the typical libraries won't have. Then the odd tapped "trace inductor" and stuff like that.

But don't you guys use OrCad? I used to, but not anymore.

Heck, is Autotrax still around? That used to be pretty good and I bet it won't be expensive anymore.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Hi Joerg,

Yeah, for production stuff we do. I definitely don't *like* that fact, but we're in the (not so uncommon) situation that we have a number of ORCAD licenses that were purchased years ago so switching requires...

1) Outlay of "new purchase price" for the alternative rather than just shelling out maintenance every year 2) Conversion of current library parts over to new system 3) Re-training of engineers & techs to use the new system

ORCAD is spendy enough that #1 isn't too big of a problem, and our libraries still only have hundreds (not thousands) of symbols in them so changeover there isn't too bad (I wouldn't imagine it'd be more than a month's effort), but #3 is difficult to get by some people since they're so used to ORCAD, they don't really see its shortcomings, and they're not personally footing the bill for it. (I think there's often a "bell curve of happiness" associated with mediocre software... new users have problems with everything, regular but undemanding users are happy because they don't stress the tool much so it works OK, whereas advanced/demanding users are unhappy again because they realize that there are so many better options out there).

Sometime this year I'm planning on making a proper (formal) presentation comparing ORCAD with, e.g., Pulsonix. We'll see what happens...

Autotrax or AutoTRAX? Wikipedia discusses two of them:

---Joel

P.S. -- Vaguely related story about software quality: I have a friend who works for a Big Software Company. In general he says that their most sophisticated users and bug reports come from Europe. They had one guy in the U.K. who was constantly filling bug reports with them -- it was almost uncanny how "good" he was at discovering them. At some point it dawned on them that... hey... this would be a very useful guy to hire! They offered, he accepted, and now he's working here in Oregon. It turns out this fellow has been using the software package in question for longer than anyone who's currently on staff at the company (!), and he has an excellent memory, being able to provide in-depth comparisons and contrasts of the package and what's been changed and fixed/broken in it for the past decade. Amazing...

Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

I literally buried the PSpice support people in accurate bug reports/"issues".

They thanked me profusely and did nothing.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     | 
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             | 
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  | 
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     | 
              
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Are you NI(national instrument) software went on sales lately? That's an indication that you dumass going down... Heehee......Halleluiah. Shame on you arrogant people.

The above was a test to see if the war bastards can fill in the missing words. Evidently they gave up, the missing words are "aware of"

Yo imposter. We most certainly saw it. Most are ignoring or blocking you already. Your little act is over, go away forever.