> On Feb 17, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Holm Tiffe <h...@freibergnet.de> wrote: > > Philipp Hachtmann wrote: > > [..] >> >>> You might consider KiCAD as an alternative to Eagle. It works pretty >>> darned well. >> Why should I? If you look at the board's size you probably see that it >> cannot be made using the free version. I own a paid Eagle 7 license. Why >> should I throw that away? Started to use Eagle as a child. Have my own >> libraries and footprints. Got used to the odds. And I won't use that >> KiCAD thing. It smells too much like dumb Arduino folks. And I do not >> want to share to much with that community. >> I am an engineer and no Arduino fool... Even if KiCAD was a really great >> program, it would still have the smell of the >> copy-and-paste-maker-arduino-blinky-blinky-community. >> >> Sorry for the rant but.... Arduino is just fubar.. >> >> If I would migrate to another EDA tool, I would probably migrate up to >> something more elaborated than Eagle or KiCAD :-) >> >> >> Kind regards >> >> Philipp > > > I don't have a problem with your arduino related point of view, but I'm > sure you never heard from the push and shove router that kicad implements? > (take a look at youtube!) > > If you have used it once, egale would look a lot like > copy-and-paste-maker-arduino-blinky-blinky-community-thingy.. > > People at the swiss CERN are developing it, for sure they only know how > to make arduinos, dnon't they? >
Just to add my $0.02 to this conversation. I’m an Eagle (professional) user for well over a decade. The issue the Phillip mentioned about footprints and designs is real. On my last design I decided to give KiCAD a try and quickly realized that the large libraries of parts and footprints I have would have to be completely re-done. That made the bar too high to switch. Most of my designs use footprints that I have developed or are readily available. Also, many new parts vendors supply Eagle libraries for their parts so I don’t have to develop them. I haven’t seen anything for KiCAD regarding that…which means even more work for me. Tool lock-in is a real phenomenon not just for the “wet-ware” but also for all of the parts libraries that exist for the tools (either vendor, community or self developed). So without a support infrastructure for parts libraries, a tool is just a “toy” regardless of how good the underlying implementation is. In terms of community supplied libraries, Eagle has those too and I’ve found that by and large they are junk (it’s easier/quicker for me to create a part on my own than to try and figure out what bizarre thing the contributor actually did and I still need to check it anyway). While I haven’t seen a lot of KiCAD contributed libraries (that’s part of the problem) I have no expectation that they would be better than the Eagle contributed libraries. TTFN - Guy