kicad questions in blog answered on the posts...
Hi I have some experiance with kicad and answered the questions posted in the blog attached to the post that way the answers for others will not be lost in the forum.
kicad questions in blog answered on the posts
(4 posts) (2 voices)-
Thanks josheeg! For the curious, the direct link is http://leaflabs.com/2010/06/kye-cad-key-cad-kay-eye-cad/#comments
Agreed on documentation; from my experience with Kicad most of the "foundation" is there but it's almost completely lacking any polish... the GUI menu layouts are chaotic and nonstandard (eg, it's hard to find regular print or pdf/png export options, they're all jumbled up in the gerber export panel). I used to have a high tolerance for this from open source software projects in the past, but i've been completely spoiled by ubuntu-ization... maybe the kicad community should get canonical to fund a make-over or get a google summer of code student to do it?
Posted 5 years ago # -
josheeg
MemberWait how did you learn eagle cad ... it has less process flow and printing to pdfs are troublesome but it has some more detailed options and is more versitile.
The tool bar allong the right or top does most things...
Also the library or module editors are in similar places depending on if your working on the sch. or brd. The open formats made it so people made generators that help make these parts in a web interface or java.Posted 5 years ago # -
I'm a huge fan of open formats, though I haven't hacked with these yet. I'd love to make an open hardware repository viewer that would auto-render individual schematics and layouts on the fly or even show diffs visually. The easier it is to manipulate designs from other scripting languages etc the better IMHO; this is what makes us excited with Kicad and willing put up with it.
To be clear, we're definitely lazy and hypocritical... i'm not planning on redoing the UI design or writing up full documentation any time soon, though we probably should file bugs or poke through the forums a little more. But it's really hard to recommend Kicad (or Eagle for that matter) as-is to new users, even those with plenty of programming and (non-layout) electrical experience. I think all the major components are in place, it just needs that last 10% of polish and documentation... which as any programmer or engineer knows is the part that ends up taking 90% of the time. It's an open source trope: 3D modeling of the boards is a cool hack that i'm sure could change the way people do layout, but at the end of the day most people probably get really frustrated about something simple like not finding an export button where they thought it should be and give up.
Get boring: create a release roadmap, do a feature freeze, redo the pull down menus and UI panels from scratch, write a ton of documentation, and have some non-developer linux users test everything, put everything together on one simple website, and do binary releases for as many platforms and package management systems as possible, and I think Kicad would be a really solid open source EDA tool that others would evangelize, write books about, teach classes for, and build upon.
Posted 5 years ago #
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