Good cheap pcb designs software.

Been looking around for cheap but good pcbcad software. Some of the free stuff and cheap stuff is rubbish. EasyPC is good but very expensive. Some want to charge a yearly fee which i dont like. Easgle is ok. I was surprised to find a good cheap package in PCBCAD51 from murton-Pike Systems. It has lots of error checking to help stop duff pcb's.

Reply to
Roger_the_Dodger
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Take a look at KiCad. It's free.

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It seems to have been driven by people at CERN

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gEDA before it was a decent open-source schematic editor with an associated printed circuit layout package, but KiCad does seem to be better. It was certainly remarkably easy to install under Linux (SuSE) and Windows 7.

People who post here seem to have used it and liked it.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

LT spice and KiCad... though I'm still using an old Eagle version. (I think I have it on three computers.. is there any reason I need to give it up? I've still got Quickbasic (8.5?) programs that I run ~weekly, 'cause they work. I'm an 80's- 90's program Luddite.)

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

My preference for home work is Diptrace. Coming from using allegro at work the part creation is streamlined and works very well. A whole lot less googling or hunting for how to do things.

$125 non-profit license gets me 1000 pins and 4 signal layers (ground and power planes are free) that has worked for all i've ever needed at home.

I've got KiCad installed and have heard that it's getting better but I just haven't taken the time to learn it.

Reply to
Marke

Getting your design onto a circuit board is its primary ticket to an electronics life. That was my inspiration 50 years ago, and after hundreds of PCB designs I'm a firm believer. But I also believe in spending serious funds for top-notch design software. Not a good place to cheap out.

33 years ago I spent $50k on a pcb design system. I figured it was worth a year or two of employees salary. That was before personal computers were up to the task. OK, maybe that was too much, but now some people are really cheaping out, IMHO
--
 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

DesignSpark PCB isn't too bad if you can get past the RS-Components-Centric feel.

Reasonably full featured

Caveats:

- You need to resister (free) on RS Components' site to get a software key then it's fully functional

- The autorouter isn't great (how many are?)

- personally only used it on small 50mmx100mm boards so not sure how it handles large projects

--
Cheers, 

Chris.
Reply to
Chris

Design Spark is written by the same team who produce Easy-PC but unfortunately the library formats are not compatible (almost certainly for commercial reasons).

I have been using Easy-PC for many years and consider it worth paying for the upgrade each year which also unlocks another year of telephone technical support. Tech support is excellent.

The most recent upgrade no longer works on Windows XP.

Easy-PC is reported to work under Wine, although I have not (yet) tried this.

I have all the Easy-PC autorouters, but never use them.

John

Reply to
jrwalliker

I have an Altium licence, but I often choose to use Kicad instead. I know that Altium has more features than Kicad, but often I can't find the one that I want, and sometimes I turn on some feature accidentally, that is so obscure to me that I have to discard my files and go back to an older saved version. I save a lot (to a new filename each time) when I am using Altium.

I don't think the price is necessarily well correlated with the work that went into it, nor how useful it is for new designs. I suspect that if people did not already have experience with Altium, their own tested library of footprints for Altium, and managers were not aware of the name, then they would struggle to charge much more than Kicad does.

Reply to
Chris Jones

Last time I checked, Altium requires you to allow access to all your files so they could download them and distribute them to unknown third parties.

This destroys any confidential agreements you may have with your customers.

Reply to
Steve Wilson

This sounds /highly/ unlikely. Are you sure this does not apply to restricted versions (student or demo versions, etc.), or at least only to data stored on Altiums site?

It would destroy Altium's business.

Reply to
David Brown

Am 20.12.18 um 14:36 schrieb Steve Wilson:

That is completely untrue. They can't even say if I use it at all. I could take the Windows7 VMware image and put it on a completely different machine. That would allow me even to continue working at the point where I had stopped. On data that is stored in the virtual machine or somewhere on MY network.

OK, two Altium Designers on the same machine is caught since I have only one license. But parallel working on 5 different unconnected machines would do.

So, they have a lot of faith in me that I don't sell copies of my virtual machine. (And, they won't help me to run it this way.)

That's a fully paid-for license. No-cost/reduced licenses may differ.

Gerhard

Reply to
Gerhard Hoffmann

I have fallen in love with making my own custom schematic symbols and PCB footprints in Altium. This way I can include inside-the-IC information to enhance the schematic, and optimize the PCB for hand or machine assembly, or a combination of both, and optimize for compactness (more or less silk screen around the parts), optimize for heat removal with extra big pads, and even provide for two or three optional part sizes, e.g., 0805 or 1206 or 1210, where different assembly versions of the design are forced to live with different available footprints (common with HV parts).

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

That's crazy. Altium has NO access to any of my files. The only factory connection made is to check my network license at startup (I've opted for two licenses with network checkout, so several of us can run the program on different machines, at different times and places).

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

I still write engineering applications in PowerBasic. I suppose I could set up Python some day.

Here's my units converter:

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and LC thing

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--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

I've tried everything mentioned in this thread so far, and hands-down KiCAD is my favorite. A major version just came out this year (5.0) and I would recommend anybody who does PCB design to check it out.

Reply to
DemonicTubes

Sorry, my mistake. I confused Altium and Autodesk. Article 14 of the Autodesk TOS used to give them the explicit right to distribute your files to third parties, but they changed the TOS on May 18, 2018:

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Their new TOS talks about confidentiality, but still allows them to distribute your files to third parties. This effectively kills CadSoft Eagle as a commercial CAD product. See also

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pricing/

Reply to
Steve Wilson

Sorry, my mistake. I confused Altium and Autodesk. Article 14 of the Autodesk TOS used to give them the explicit right to distribute your files to third parties, but they changed the TOS on May 18, 2018:

formatting link

Their new TOS talks about confidentiality, but still allows them to distribute your files to third parties. This effectively kills CadSoft Eagle as a commercial CAD product. See also

formatting link
pricing/

Reply to
Steve Wilson

I always take the time to make (or find) a 3D model too. It really helps with visualization of fit and that sort of thing. A lot of vendors and distributors are supplying models these days, however they're a bit spotty in quality.

--Spehro Pefhany

Reply to
speff

a quick hack for kicad is a model that is just a 1x1x1mm cube you then scale it to the size of the component

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

There's a trick to fixing that......

...Thing is, there's a thousand tricks to enabling and disabling the various features, which is the point, that's what you're complaining about: needing intricate, vendor-specific knowledge to run the program.

(But on that note, try right-click file in Project panel, Local History. If you haven't disabled that setting, it should have a version for every previous time you've CTRL+S'd, each file. There's also recovery (autosaves) in some obscure AppData folder, that you can move to a more useful location at your preference. With as often as Altium crashes (which might only be a few times a day, better than some I suppose but comparison is hardly a reasonable metric for crash rate..), they'd be up shit creek if they didn't have an autosave option.)

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design 
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Reply to
Tim Williams

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