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First Design with Kicad

I am starting a design with Kicad in order to learn it. The Kicad web site has a list of Tutorials, but the first one, "Official KiCad tutorial" doesn't load. Anyone know what is wrong with it?

bazaar.launchpad.net/~kicad-developers/kicad/doc/view/head:/doc/help/en/Getting_Started_in_KiCad.pdf

I am reading a tutorial from Teho Labs. So far, so good. Does anyone have any suggestions on what is harder or what might be stumbling blocks?

I noticed that when I tried the menu item "New from Template" it points by default to a location in the install directory under "Program Files...". That is a no-no under Windows. Will this be an issue or will no data be put there unless I do it? I will be writing to a separate directory in my user space I expect.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman
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There are a few that could claim to be the official site. The tutorial links from seem to work okay.

The original libraries more or less grew from Jean-Pierre's personal components and so can be a little quirky. When you add new parts to the schematic or PCB libraries, recommend putting them in personal libraries.

Some folks dislike the CVPCB step that marries schematic items to footprints for use by the layout editor. I'm fine with it and footprints can be assigned directly from the schematic if that suits.

I've never bothered with templates. I just start a default new project and then use the "page settings" to define the paper size and text for the title blocks.

Reply to
Rich Webb

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Yet another KiCad tutorial is available at

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The FAQ

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mentions another tutorial or two.

Wikibooks is a wiki, so please edit it and make it better.

Reply to
davidcary2

Not working for me. I get 502 bad gateway error. Every page at that site I try. I was able view pages there a few days ago.

I often use a tool and then don't use it again for months. So I need as much handled for me without requiring memorization of steps as possible. I'm used to using FreePCB and Orcad, but Orcad is commercial and FreePCB seems rather stagnant at this point. I saw a video showing trace pushing in KiCad which would be nice to use on tight boards.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

It's a volunteer-hosted site (open source, what can you do?) that has had issues like that in the past. Seems okay this morning from here, though.

There is a wiki at

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and also a discussion group over at
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which is, unfortunately, hosted on Yahoo. The "neo" group interface on Yahoo is awful.

It's reasonably intuitive as compared to, say, EAGLE. ;-) The help files are pretty comprehensive.

You'll need to grab one of the recent builds for push routing; I'm running 4680 which does have "push & shove" (under Edit | Interactive Router) so I assume all of the later ones have it as well.

There are pre-compiled builds at

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and I assume there will be another official stable build this summer.

Also, be aware that the much loved Freerouting.net has succumbed to a takedown notice. IP dispute with the author's former employer.

Reply to
Rich Webb

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