[andyjohnson0]

Can you comment on the situation with component libraries for kicad? How does it compare to Eagle?

I've recently tried Fritzing but keep finding that some components aren't available. Defining my own is kind of tedious.

[TD-Linux]

I generally end up using an online tool [1] for high pin count parts. It's not the best though, someday I will write something better.

BTW, in most professional contexts, parts are all created by the engineer - vendor part libraries are pretty rare. I know Altium is trying to change that, maybe soon we will see something similar happen with KiCAD.

[1] http://kicad.rohrbacher.net/quicklib.php

[andyjohnson0]

Thanks for the link: very useful!

[reportingsjr]

This release of kicad supports using eagle footprints, but not schematic symbols.

There are quite a handful of component libraries, but you'll probably have to do a bit of digging.