17 Feb
2017
17 Feb
'17
9:46 a.m.
On Feb 17, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Holm Tiffe <holm at
freibergnet.de> wrote:
Philipp Hachtmann wrote:
[..]
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
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