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by mafuyu 3853 days ago
The hobbyist community has been switching over to KiCAD, to the point where I believe KiCAD has a significant majority over Eagle in OSHPark orders. A lot of people switched with the new Eagle licensing model, which they put on hold due to backlash.
1 comments
wicker 3852 days ago
I'm on support at OSH Park and we're still seeing a sizable majority of Eagle boards, but KiCad is definitely on the rise. I've got the impression that a lot of folks have been turned off by having to get the daily builds, so I'm incredibly excited to see the stable release. I'm expecting we'll see KiCad come to parity with Eagle over the next year or two.

We're also working on being able to take .kicad_pcb files directly, in the same way we take Eagle .brd files now. In the meantime, I wrote up a page with some KiCad screenshots and instructions for how to generate the gerbers and drill files we need. [1]

The major issues we see can be solved by checking the Protel naming format option so we can detect layers correctly, and by putting the board outline by itself on the Edge Cuts layer.

[1] http://docs.oshpark.com/design-tools/kicad/

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reportingsjr 3852 days ago
Laen mentioned on the amp hour podcast a couple of years ago that kicad was the majority at the time. Later on he said that it was just a blip at the time for some reason and eagle became much more dominant.

I wish I could upvote your post more for the middle paragraph. Direct kicad_pcb input in to OSH Park will be fantastic!

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bsilvereagle 3852 days ago
Do you see a lot of cloud based boards (Upverter, Altium's cloud component, etc) coming through?
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wicker 3852 days ago
We do! They're way behind Eagle and KiCad, but they're a fair and growing number. Our current challenge is to keep expanding our ability to automatically detect the default gerber naming scheme so it doesn't matter which CAD package you're using. I know we've recently really nailed down the Altium variants (Designer, CircuitMaker) but I'm less sure about Upverter.

One of the downsides of accepting gerber files is that a lot of folks rename to match our suggested naming pattern to be sure the files work, so it can be tough to determine which CAD package was originally used. Plus, we still get gerbers from some rare ones like TraxMaker 2000 or Ranger 3.

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