[neltnerb]

I saw the writing on the wall for EagleCAD once they stopped releasing any kind of bug fixes despite charging subscription fees and started ignoring the forums other than triaging the complaints. It was clear they were going to do this and break EagleCAD to force people to use Fusion 360.

I don't use Windows, I don't want to, I've used Fusion 360 and it was slow as heck, didn't have constraint based solving that worked, was written in some awful system that made it require an internet connection, and they want me to use an EagleCAD-themed editor that they've hacked in?

I switched to using KiCAD for all new projects a year ago. It was a little bit of a learning curve. I started with designing a flexible heater PCB, which was good for a learning project because it had so few components. Now I'm making PCBs with four layers, inner ground and power planes, custom design rules, using fancy add-ons, taking full advantage of the HTML BOM plugin when teaching grad students how to solder, and I can be 100% sure that even if it gets worse I can still get the old version to work (probably).

Even the part library is more coherent and higher quality (!) than the EagleCAD one. I literally refused to use the built in EagleCAD libraries because the quality was so variable, sometimes it's fine, sometimes I ruin an entire PCB because their version of SO-8 had a weird width. KiCAD is way better, it's closer to OrCAD and lets me make the schematic, assign the footprints, and if I don't like a footprint I can just edit it on the fly for that document or to just save a new version of the footprint forever.

I've even got it set up to use Dropbox to share designs between computers (no issues) and that includes downloading STP 3D models and adding them to my footprints.

I know it's going to take me a while longer to be nearly as adept as I was at EagleCAD, and I'm going to miss that autorouter (the KiCAD one is very good for what it is, but it's a hard problem). There's a lot of keyboard shortcuts that you internalize after 20 years of using a program.

But it will be worth it, and frankly already is worth it. I've had to make like four custom footprints because the default library is just so well organized that I can actually find the one or maybe two versions of WSON-10 or whatever instead of having to guess which library has the version that matches my mechanical drawing.

[mindentropy]

How do you go about doing the mechanical drawing for a footprint not found in the library? I tried to design a simple SD card board as a learning project. I gave up when the part that I selected was difficult to draw. I was not sure whether I was missing some information or is it my inexperience. My persistence on learning and eventual failure left me with the bad taste.

PS: The part I selected seemed to be a generic brand and did not get any info to clarify the dimensions.

[neltnerb]

There is a footprint wizard, like EagleCAD had. That's usually where to start if it's at all possible.

I personally don't think I'm good enough at KiCAD to draw one from scratch. I could probably make it okay, but it wouldn't be professional quality. Life goal is to be able to meaningfully contribute to the project library globally, they have high standards.

I managed to draw a USB port that was probably the trickiest one I had to do. It was really the same as eagle, I had to place pads, give them proper numbers, define through holes (it let me do slots, even with an offset which was way better than Eagle), and then it just let me connect it to a USB-C symbol in my schematic no questions asked.

But making a custom symbol was also the same as Eagle. Same process, label pins, define directions, place labels...

The only difference maybe is that footprints and symbols aren't forcibly associated, and connections are done via the pin/pad numbers.

With a datasheet of that low of quality you're better off measuring by hand though, I don't know a way around that one.

[mindentropy]

The biggest problem for me in doing custom symbols is the measurements and the subsequent drawing. My life goal is as yours, manage to create a custom symbol and also build my own custom dev board. Unfortunately many things got in the way and the work kept delaying for almost 9-10 years now.

The reason I picked a particular SD card was because it was low cost. My country has crazy import fees and because of this I am forced to select low cost parts which usually have bad datasheet and documentation.