On 07/01/2013 05:51 PM, Karl Schmidt wrote: > Eagle and gEDA will drain psychic energy ( As in what Don Lancasters calls > a 'psychic Energy > sink') - I've used both (I still have nightmares). You should use kicad even > if it means setting up a Debian box to run it on.
I bought the professional version of Eagle, over a decade ago. It was $1200, which is not only more than I've spent on any other software, it's probably more than I've spent on all other software I've ever purchased. Eagle had a serious learning curve, but I designed quite a few PCBs with it and it was well worth the effort to learn IMO, and it was worth the price too for my application. I like that it was available in a native Linux version (I suspect it was developed in Linux and ported to Windows), and I appreciated that there was a free version for students and hobbyists to use for noncommercial applications. I haven't designed any boards in many years, but I'm facing a project where I will need to design a small board, and I may have larger boards I'll need to design for future projects. I was considering whether I should install the free version of Eagle with the likelihood of paying to catch up my maintenance fees that lapsed long ago (I hate the very concept of maintenance fees), or possibly installing gEDA or kicad. I assumed that open source ECAD has improved a lot since I tried it long ago. I'm not opposed to commercial software, but I must admit that I enjoy using open source software. I do like the fact that it's free as in "free beer", but I love the fact that it's free as in "free speech". I'll give kicad a try. Thanks for the recommendation. PS - I'm a big Don Lancaster fan. We wrote for some of the same hobby electronics and hacker magazines back in the day. He's a dude and a half. I never went on a tinaja quest, though. On 07/01/2013 06:04 PM, andy pugh wrote: > the web page says "It is not permissible to be read by anyone who > has ever met a lawyer. Use is confined to Engineers with more than 370 > course hours of electronic engineering for theoretical studies." Now I'll DEFINITELY give kicad a try! :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
