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by csirac2
4288 days ago
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Agree, I'm 80% software these days but ~8 years ago I discovered Eagle and found it was a huge relief at the time coming from Protel (now Altium). I've been getting my feet wet again; perhaps Altium has fixed the UX which drove me away originally but they don't seem (until now?) to have had any entry-level appropriate pricing. And whilst I could pick up Eagle 7 recently and get productive again real quick, the fact that I still had to draw my own PCB footprints which are intrinsically inseparable from the overall component definition is so disappointing. A separate PCB footprint library, separate in the sense that component packages should be normalized and trivially re-usable across devices without error-prone copy-pasta madness seemed painfully obvious 10 years ago and it's still painfully obvious now. Drawing a new schematic symbol and wiring that up to physical pins in a PCB footprint is no big deal, but I just hate having to draw a new PCB footprint from a datasheet. Even on the off-chance that you can copy-paste from some other device with similar enough package, you still end up with inconsistent silkscreen/gate naming conventions etc. because each part library author does things differently. |
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Unfortunately, software like web frameworks and office productivity gets so many more eyeballs than PCB design software. The market size of PCB design software is small. A single copy of gEDA/Altium/Eagle/Orcad/Kicad can produce a piece of hardware that one billion people use. You could say the same for a single copy of Word, but people own and interact with thousands of different documents, but only a handful to a dozen PCBs and most people are using the same ones (iPhone, laptop motherboard, etc.).
As more hobbyists engage at the Arduino level, simple, free tools can open up a bit... but professional stuff will still suffer severe inertial effects - the value of a single PCB design program is simply too huge.
I don't see this free(asterisk) offering from Altium as any more than a freemium pattern to divert marketshare from Eagle in particular. I use Eagle, but the EEs at work say Altium is full of bugs. Its 3d board viewer is a gimmick that hooks a lot of people, but it's not as critical as having the proper components.
p.s. for simple PCB design, there are numerous free tools:
http://www.electroschematics.com/2249/pcb-design-software/
and here's a brief overview of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_EDA_software