Well, I now have five different CAD programs installed and so far Diptrace
is the easiest to use. It has easy-to-use component selection, busses and
the workflow seems to be smooth.
I downloaded the 250-pin version so we'll see how far I get. I will probably
exceed 250 pins but it's a very reasonable price to move to 500.
On 6/16/07 1:20 PM, "Alexandre Souza" <alexandre-listas at
e-secure.com.br>
wrote:
Does anyone
have any recommendations for a reasonably priced schematics
capture and layout program for either Windows or Mac OSX that can autoroute
do boards up to say 6? x 8?? When I say reasonable, I?m thinking $250 or
less.
Good options are:
- Eagle. Not too expensive in the "non-profit" version with boards up to
16x10 if I'm not mistaken. The UI is clunky and the autorouter does it work
in double sided boards.
- Diptrace. "work in progress" but a GREAT program, tons of libraries
(and convert eagle libraries to it!) and the developer is very active and
responsive for all kind of questions and bug reports. Made me delay the
purchase of the eagle license
- Circad - Best of all, but doesn't do autorouter (which I don't need
anyways) and very, very expensive. Ugh.
- Protel - there is a 30 day "trial" which you can build your board :o)
- KCad. Free but a good program, worth a look.
I'd stick with diptrace. I see nothing better than it
Rich
--
Rich Cini
Collector of Classic Computers
Build Master and lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator
http://www.altair32.com
http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp