Based on the hardware file types I've noticed on Github,
is there a Leaflabs decision to move forward with Eagle and away from Kicad
Eagle replacing Kicad for Leaflabs
(14 posts) (7 voices)-
zoofdxp
MemberThanks soundcyst, looking over this leaflab stuff inspired me to download Kicad and look it over, and it is amazing. The few comparisons I've found online attempt to be unbiased, but I believe Kicad is a clear winner. I started on Orcad DOS (briefly) and went on to all of the Protel/Altium products from Protel 98 clear through to the present day Altium Designer. Given the essentially no layer or size restrictions and the clean IDE, not to mention the awesome 3D viewer, all for free mind you, why would anyone consider Eagle at all. Open source is open source, give'all Kicad files, folks will get over themselves and learn it. In my opinion all of the open hardware out there should switchover to Kicad, multiplatform, what's not to like. I've never liked Orcad's IDE and have always tried to push people to Protel/Altium. Eagle is to Orcad as Kicad is to Altium in my mind. It seems the wrong thing is always the most popular one.
Posted 5 years ago # -
poslathian
LeafLabszoofdxp, while I won't claim that
kicad or geda (libre tools)
compare with some of the commercial EDA toolkits you mentioned, we definitely support kicad here at LeafLabs, and are moving away from eagle. It has it's rough edges but overall a great tool with a great development community!Posted 5 years ago # -
gbulmer
ModeratorI am thinking of leading some workshops for school children on making PCB's.
The vast majority of schools don't give them that opportunity.As an experiment, I've tried working through Eagle with a couple of folks, it was okay, but it *is* annoying.
BUT, the Eagle help documents are very complete, and there is some material to support learning it.Have you guys got some pointers you would share on where I could get that level of documentation and examples for KiCAD? If that is missing, I think KiCAD may well be "the second CAD package" folks learn.
If you know of KiCAD material, but think it's a bit flacky, but workable, I am willing to trial it at local schools (where I volunteer and run after hours clubs).
My plan is to start with small boards, and use single sided DIY or dorkbotpdx.
We are using surface mount and a mini-oven, so there isn't a lot of drilling to do either :-)BTW - Did you see this video, this guy is working on two step DIY PCB:
http://warrantyvoidifremoved.com/posts/2011-01-01/27c3-file-print-electronics(it doesn't start until about minute 8)
He has modded an Epson Inkjet print head to print molten wax, which instantly 'freezes' on contact with the PCB. This is the etch resist. He estimates features down to 0.1mm.Posted 5 years ago # -
some folk at a hackerspace here in LA have been experimenting with plating and milling to do 2 layer diy pcbs.. they're eager to start experimenting with 4 layers..
i think one of the huge reasons eagle is popular in the diy community is because of the sparkfun and adafruit libraries.. the kicad libraries i was browsing looked old and a bit useless.
Posted 5 years ago # -
zoofdxp
MemberThis script ftp://ftp.cadsoft.de/eagle/userfiles/ulp/eagle2kicad-0.9b.ulp claims to convert Eagle schematic and footprint symbols to Kicad, I haven't tried it yet, but if it works, that would be pretty cool. Unless someone has done it, or gets to it before I can reply, I will attempt it and see what happens and report back...might yield some instant up to date libraries.
Posted 5 years ago # -
i can't understand what's a hollywar ? if anybody need eagle variant (with library) i can send sch/brd with 0.2mm/0.2 mm width/distance and 0.4/0.9mm drill/vias. all smd 0603 only battery charge max1555 chip. At wednesday i receive new shields
1. one named ComIO - 1 ethernet, 1 WiFi, 1 RF 868 and 2 usb plug (based on VNC2) (for Arduino and Maple both)
2. expansion board to standard SPI headers (D12-D9) or to Maple extended header for ZG2100 WiFi adapter. If needed - say address and i send (Or may be in any public place). I can't present pcb w/o money - but it not expensive (it anybody sold yourself). Of course i publish all info on my blog akb77.com/g later with sch, brd, lbr
Think about soft and never about hard.Posted 5 years ago # -
jessb
LeafLabs@gbulmer, unfortunately, from what I've experienced the documentation for Kicad is definitely not as friendly as the documentation for Eagle, but there are still some very good resources out there. For just getting started there are plenty of good beginner tutorials -- the mini tutorial on the wiki (http://kicad.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Mini_tutorial) is a good starting place. I guess the main difference is, as you note, most of the material for Kicad seems to expect you're already familiar with the basics of circuitboard layout and design, which might be a hindrance for students just getting into the field. The other frustrating thing is that once you move beyond the basics, there's not much documentation about the slightly more complicated problems you might encounter. Fortunately, there's a yahoo users group (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/) that's extremely active and very friendly. I found that, when googling around for solutions to problems I'd encountered, I found the answers in mail archives from the yahoo group more often than not. So, not quite as clean as "real" documentation, but workable nonetheless imo. I think it would be great to get students started with Kicad, as the limitations of free Eagle quickly become real problems.
And @soundcyst and @zoofdxp, I've had pretty good success with the eagle2kicad script zoofdxp linked. Occasionally, the footprint converter does glitchy things, but overall, it's kept me from pining too badly for eagle libraries.
Posted 4 years ago # -
gbulmer
Moderatorjessb - thank you for the advice. I have some of my own footprints, so the eagle2kicad script would get used.
I am working through Eagle with my school-age colleague.
Once we have worked through Eagle, and he's comfortable, and made a PCB, then maybe we will give KiCAD a try.
He is my guru on what school-age folks can do.I think the Eagle user interface is pretty horrid, and the size restriction is very annoying if the board has got mucked up. Having very little space to reorganize the parts is infuriating sometimes. BUT, it is sufficiently powerful, that I can do simple boards okay.
I can get quite frustrated reading forums to get answers. On some forums, where I understand the content, there are folks who, IMHO, give superb answers very quickly, and then there are also folks who don't understand that they neither understand the question nor the answer, who seem to confuse the original poster, and cause doubt where there is none.
I assume the same things happens on all forums, and it takes me several days of reading to figure out who to trust when I can't judge the quality of the answer directly. (I have had a bunch of thoughts to improve the situation, but I never get round to writing the code. :-)
Posted 4 years ago # -
josheeg
MemberAll my designs are now in kicad I did one or 2 boards in eagle and the difficult thing about kicads documentationa & in its download is where all the pdfs are help contents.
here is my latest maple r5 shield
https://sites.google.com/site/openloopproject/
it is done in kicad and the previous examples were made at dorkbotpdx.
right click to go into a herarchal schematic right click on a blank area to go back out.
eatch part of kicad has different help documentation.Posted 4 years ago # -
poslathian
LeafLabsjosheeg, what do you use this awesome "neuro cyber prosthetic" for?
Also, I remember a long time ago you were worried about serial bandwidth and you were using extra hardware to get the bandwidth up. What was the bandwidth requirement on that? Incidentally Ive been stress testing a new serialUSB implementation and im getting ~1200kb/s without any clever programming or special PC side drivers (just standard virtual com). I dont know if that was fast enough. I bet it can be faster by lifting some of the usb throttling going on on the host side.
Posted 4 years ago # -
josheeg
Memberposlathian thanks for your interest it is always inspiring to know people are interested and great to have help.
I simplified my design to 1 ads1298 and a DLP development module that has a high speed usb chip on it with a high-speed virtual com port. FT2232h. parallel in serial out. I was going to have 8 ads1298 chips that would take a lot of bandwidth with 1 it could be better & might work.
Well I did find some documents that made my design easier maby...
EMG Decoding in real time with ~94.5% acuracy using 4 electrodes into a arm band.
the decoding algorithms using Hidden Markov Models, auto regressive coeficents...
http://www.sce.carleton.ca/faculty/chan/matlab.htmlConversion of Matlab or Octave to C++ using Ublas was something I found called mat2cpp.
Now the paper said this works well in realtime does that mean I could use this program mat2cpp and ublas to bring this matlab code to c++ then the maple r5 on leaflabs.com
I thought I would need 64 or so channels to seperate out 64 signals max. But this method gets more state outputs than electrodes.
But to test if I can get the converter and matlab code to work in octave and into c++ then it could run on the pc maby not the maple. But it would be great if it could the hardware design is being checked for a ads1298 8 channel maple shield.
Posted 4 years ago #
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