Getting into pcb design.

Quite a few of us are fans of Diptrace as a low cost and intuitive option. Part creation and flow from schematic to pcb design work well and make quit e a bit of sense. It is my go to recommendation for newcomers.

I've tried KiCad a few times but always end up moving back to the 6 layer l icense I have for Diptrace. Learning curve is steeper in my experience than diptrace but it has a large community that love it and it is very well fea tured.

At work I use Allegro. It has feature sets that are very nice for routing h igh density/speed design but I don't do anything that advanced at home. The learning curve is very steep and unless you have coworkers who are knowled geable it will take months to become reasonably efficient. Not sure on cost but I assume it is ~10k per network licence for all the features.

Rough summary: Diptrace and Kicad are great low/free options. Diptrace taki ng the crown on usability and kicad has larger feature set that you most li kely won't need for quite a while.

Mark

KiCAD has a large user base and active development. It may be buggy, but you will find they all are, to varying (never unnoticeable) degrees. Difference is, they're actually interested in fixing them. (If you find too many bothersome bugs in the stable branch, try the nightly builds.)

After that, I would suggest Circuit Maker/Studio (I don't know the difference..), or EAGLE (which is not free anymore, but it's not like it's hard to find downloads of the free version).

There's a number of vendor-locked and web-based ones too, but I wouldn't recommend getting into that habit.

Tim

-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design Website:

Had a look on ebay and cheapest is PCBCAD51 for £4-99. Seems to do a lot for the money.

A mate suggested KI-CAD which I had a quick look at. While it has excellent libraries their website suggested latest versions haven't been debugged fully yet.

I had a brief encounter with Easy-PC many years ago but that is like £400 ish now.

packages out there. They vary from free to many thousands of pounds.

nt libraries their website suggested latest versions haven't been debugged fully yet.

?400 ish now.

Kicad works great and there are plenty of tutorials on youtube that will take you from installing it to having an assembled pcb in your hand

packages out there. They vary from free to many thousands of pounds.

nt libraries their website suggested latest versions haven't been debugged fully yet.

?400 ish now.

The RS-branded DesignSpark PCB is free and quite capable. I've done several (albeit simple) designs with it. Requires a sign-up to the web site to get an activation key but there's no cost involved.

FWIW

packages out there. They vary from free to many thousands of pounds.

nt libraries their website suggested latest versions haven't been debugged fully yet.

?400 ish now.

I've used a package called FreePCB which is very nice to use. The freepcb. com website has the latest version the original author used and it is prett y bullet proof with no bugs that I can recall. You have to install the ori ginal version and then install the update. It works fine under Windows 10 or any other version, but if you use a version that won't allow you to have data files in the program_files directory you may need to manually edit th e .ini file to point to another location or install the program in another directory.

It has the basic features you need. Not matched or controlled impedance su

um on the web site, but I don't think it will allow a new member to sign up . We have a yahoo group which I am thinking of changing to Groups.io. One very supportive member of the old group doesn't like Yahoo's requirements to sign up.

There's a crippleware version of Altium Designer, called CircuitStudio. It costs $500 for a perpetual license. By all appearances it isn't badly crippled at all, and that's cheaper than Diptrace. It has good import/export capabilities as well.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I've been through this process a dozen times and a package you never hear of and seriously under rated is Sprint layout (Germany). Unreal how user friendly and what it can do for 50 bucks. I use it and nothing else.