PCB Designing software

Hi, I recently used the services of

the service was excellent, probably not as sophisticated as some but the miniPCB deal (Three 2.5"x3.8" boards for $50) is excellent, quality was good, fast shipping with DC etc. JC

You should be able to find the shareware versions of IVEX Windraft and WinBoard on the web for download. The product is no longer supported, and has a bit of a learning curve. I think the free version has a 100 pin limit. Product had a few bugs and went through several revisions, but it should do what you want.

There probably is nothing that can do a reasonable job of "automatically" creating a board layout, given just the schematic (but I could be wrong). However, there are packages that have schematic capture and board layout components that work together to assist *you* to create the layout.

KiCad

and gEDA are each free, open source suites with schematic capture and board layout.

KiCad has a reasonably active and supportive user community and is available in versions for both Linux and MS Windows. The principal author's homepage is over at

I'm less familiar with gEDA. As far as I know, there is not an official MS Windows distribution available. DJ Delorie may drop by with more info, though...

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

ExpressSCH and ExpressPCB are two freebies that I have. They are reasonably simple and easy to use. The PCB designer is not an autorouter, but if you attach the netlist of a schematic produced by the drawing package, the PCB package will guide you through making the correct connections between your manually placed components, to satisfy the schematic.

Arfa

That's missing out the best part of designing your own. ;-)

--
*Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film *

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com

Rich Webb wrote:

TinyCAD and FreePCB are also FOSS and work quasi-well together. (Windoze-only, but both will run fine under WINE.)

Previously, they had produced Windoze-compatible binaries but they stopped when the mailing list got cluttered with inane questions from people who could barely use Windoze--much less use an ECAD.

Dan McMahill maintains the build script for getting gEDA going under Windoze. If you can get thru that successfully, it demonstrates that you might be qualified to use the package.

Some boot-to-a-desktop Linux disks contain both gEDA and KiCAD. Ubuntu Electronics Remix and Fedora Electronic Lab Spin are probably the most up to date. You can run those without installing anything. Ubuntu and Fedora can write to FAT32 and NTFS partitions.

...and this question doesn't qualify as "repair". Questions about ECADs belong in sci.electronics.cad just as beginners' questions belong in sci.electronics.basics.