KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

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Basile
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by Basile »

No no Kicad is open source. My remark on file format is only applicable to EAGLE files.
It seems better to start with KiCAD and use it the whole way through, if you don't want to pay for the software. (Like me)
I personnaly agree with you. I think moving from Kicad to EAGLE is the easiest way than moving from EAGLE to Kicad. Now that I'm moving to Kicad, I regrets that I do not have take the time to use it earlier.

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easternstargeek
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by easternstargeek »

First- Thanks to everyone out there for your contributions!

I used OrCAD back in the 80's and 90's, and it was an amazing piece of software, considering that it ran nicely (if somewhat slowly) on my old Heath Zenith XT PC that I built in 1986. Seldom has so much been created with so little. OrCAD had one very important thing in common with KiCAD- the separation between part and footprint libraries. That was the one thing that really soured my on Eagle- I couldn't conceive of using their approach. I think it would drive me crazy (and that'd be a short drive!).

I'm feeling better about my decision to move forward with KiCAD. My next question, is after I peruse the manual, are there any worthwhile tutorials or video walk-throughs out there that you may have found helpful? I find videos a good way to organise my brain in preparation for digesting the manual.

Thanks, again!

inventorjack
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by inventorjack »

CuriousInventor's tutorial really helped me get started with KiCad: http://store.curiousinventor.com/guides/kicad/

Also, the PDFs that come with KiCad do a great job of explaining things. Between those two resources, you'll be able to do just about anything.

jone
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by jone »

Personally I prefer KiCad to Eagle. When I was first looking for a tool, I tried a simple design with both of them and just found KiCad eaasier to get to grips with.

There's a tutorial (and a similar thread) over at the Dangerous Prototypes forum http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/vi ... f=2&t=1977

There are Eagle -> KiCad conversion tools/scripts around, but not sure I'd trust them. There is a large auto-converted Eagle library on the net somewhere, but I've had terrible results with that. I understand CircuitBee have done some work on conversions more recently, but haven't tried their tool. http://www.circuitbee.com/help/eagleimport

Basile
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by Basile »

I used also Orcad for Spice integration... very usefull to illustre circuit theory. Now ngspice is installed on very Linux pc I have. I also used Protel, now named as Altium. Great piece of software too.

The create thing I would like to see on Kicad is the NGspice integration.... maybe I will look at that, as the KICAD file formats are well documented ....

edit : Oh thanks for the link to Eagle2Kicad tool... I will give it a chance...

Agent24
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by Agent24 »

One thing worth noting is that while most tutorials for KiCAD are fairly good, they are usually a bit out of date by now as KiCAD is improved and new features are added all the time.

However, they are mostly accurate and what has changed, is quite obvious to figure out.

This looks useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txgsil3Q43A

psc
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by psc »

Hi,

I prefer Kicad: FREE and you don't have to choose the package (DIP, SMD etc) when you make the schematic. Kicad is coded in wxWidgets: easy to customized.

I made 2 very basic videos tutorials on Kicad (far from perfect): http://www.workinprogress.ca/kicad-video-tutorial/

minerva
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by minerva »

Personally, I use Eagle a lot. I want to try out KiCAD one day, but I haven't yet gotten around to it.

I haven't had any real experience working with KiCAD, so I can't really make a good judgement of what I think is better to use, personally.
But still... a few comments.
EasternStarGeek wrote:I like KiCAD because there is no board size limit
OK, let me just clarify something here.
Eagle has no limitations on board size.


Eagle is a commercial software product. If you want to use it, you buy it. It is not open-source Free Software.
When dealing with some people who are militantly pro-Open-Source, this takes a little while to sink in, and then they act almost like they're offended by the fact that you're talking about using commercial software. Some of the people who insist that Eagle is bad and KiCAD is better are just Stallman-style Open Source fanatics who insist that the commercial software engineering industry is the devil's work.

CADSoft provides the Freeware License for Eagle, which is free-as-in-free-beer for non-profit, hobbyist or educational use. It limits the dimensions of the routable copper area, and it limits you to drawing only two copper layers, but that's pretty much it, you can still use all the other functionality of Eagle. I think it's actually generous of them to provide it freely, to provide a powerful piece of software that meets the needs of most hobbyists and students.

You can build some quite impressive, quite complex, quite powerful projects within the constraints that the freeware license gives you.
As a hobbyist and professional engineer, 90% of all the PCB designs I actually create for real-world projects, both hobby and commercial, are fully compatible with the constraints of the Eagle freeware license.

Eagle:
-------
Pro: Is available on and is fully supported on Windows and on Mac OSX and on Linux, and works perfectly well across all these platforms. (This is a very nice thing, and it is rare to see for any software at all, really.) It is the same software with the same interface and it works the same way, on all platforms.

Pro: It is a stable, professionally developed, maintained and supported, essentially bug-free commercial software product.
Pro: Does everything you need to do or want to do. Standard Gerber CAM output? Easy, including in the freeware version. Four copper layers? No problem.
Pro: Autorouter? I don't use it personally but it is available for those who choose to use it, and it seems to work relatively well as far as autorouters go.

Pro: It comes with a very generous freeware licencing option for hobby, educational and non-commercial uses, which is slightly limited as an incentive to purchase the software after you've tried it out, but which is fully suitable for 90% of actual board layouts people will actually need to make.

Con: It is a relatively expensive commercial software product. (This is only really significant for hobbyists, if you're a professional engineer working on commercial products, you should have no problems with buying good software.)

KiCAD:
--------

Pro: It is free, open-source software, you don't pay anything for it at all.
Con: It doesn't have the same amount of community support, tutorials, information, documentation, and community examples out there on the 'net as Eagle does.
Con: Does not work on Mac OS? Personally I find this to be a huge disadvantage, pretty much a complete dealbreaker.

Does KiCAD generate standard Gerber CAM output?

Agent24
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by Agent24 »

minerva wrote:OK, let me just clarify something here.
Eagle has no limitations on board size.


Eagle is a commercial software product. If you want to use it, you buy it. It is not open-source Free Software.
When dealing with some people who are militantly pro-Open-Source, this takes a little while to sink in, and then they act almost like they're offended by the fact that you're talking about using commercial software. Some of the people who insist that Eagle is bad and KiCAD is better are just Stallman-style Open Source fanatics who insist that the commercial software engineering industry is the devil's work.
Yes we know the commercial version has no limitations, but we're talking about the Light\Free version of Eagle here, as it is the one more applicable to hobbyists.

If I came across as an open-source fanatic let me tell you that is not true. I like Linux quite a lot and I also love KiCAD but I do not use solely open-source. I also use Windows because there are quite a lot of programs I love that are Windows only. I do not like WINE, I have never had very good experiences with it. Gaming is also a big reason to use Windows.

If Linux provided 100% compatibility with all my unique Windows applications, I probably would switch entirely to Linux for the cost savings but at the moment I don't see that ever happening.

I do not use Eagle because for my use I would have to pay for it, and why would I pay for it when KiCAD costs nothing and does everything I need, as well as some features I really like (which as I said, Eagle doesn't have)

minerva wrote:Con: Does not work on Mac OS? Personally I find this to be a huge disadvantage, pretty much a complete dealbreaker.
There is nothing saying that KiCAD does not work on OSX It is simply not as well supported as the other versions (how different, I have no idea)

The KiCAD Wiki states:
KiCad on the Mac OS X is still experimental, but most functionality works. Only the viewport algorithm is slow and the about dialog is broken.
I can only say what I tried, once on Tiger (to see how it ran) and it wouldn't load. I never looked into the problem, as I would rather use KiCAD on an OS I use often than try to fix it on one I don't. It may have been a very simple error to fix, or I may have just downloaded a bad build. Probably would be better to try it on a newer version of OSX anyway.

http://kicad.xor-gate.org/screenshots/ Shows KiCAD apparently working under OSX.
minerva wrote:Does KiCAD generate standard Gerber CAM output?
Yes KiCAD can generate Gerbers and drill files that all normal board houses will accept. It also has a Gerber viewer feature inbuilt.

minerva
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by minerva »

Agent24 wrote: Yes we know the commercial version has no limitations, but we're talking about the Light\Free version of Eagle here, as it is the one more applicable to hobbyists.
OK then. Nobody had actually explicitly made that clear.

Agent24
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by Agent24 »

minerva wrote:
Agent24 wrote: Yes we know the commercial version has no limitations, but we're talking about the Light\Free version of Eagle here, as it is the one more applicable to hobbyists.
OK then. Nobody had actually explicitly made that clear.
I guess they didn't. Though the OP said initially "I like KiCAD because there is no board size limit" so I assumed he was comparing it to Eagle Light.

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westfw
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by westfw »

CADSoft provides the Freeware License for Eagle
Also the cheap ($49) for limited commercial license, inexpensive "non-profit" license (100x160mm, 4layer, $150), and in fact the "full commercial" version is pretty reasonably priced compared to other full commercial CAD programs. And the freeware version can be used to study and manufacture boards of any size that people with a commercial license have made. As vendors go, I think CadSoft is pretty wonderful, and it sort of pisses me off every time I see a bunch of ... (hmm. Can't quite think of the correct mildly insulting term here... "whining members of the non-target audience"?) complaining that it's "not free and open enough." Grr.
There is nothing saying that KiCAD does not work on OSX
I did. I believe the phrase I used was "completely unusable." While the last binary I downloaded did run, I was looking at multi-second lagging in doing things like moving the cursor. I try every couple months, and there hasn't been any progress. "Not as well supported" appears to mean that no one is working on it beyond checking to see if it still compiles. :-(

Whichever CAD package you learn first will be the hardest. Judging from the complaints I've seen from new users, there are just a lot of CONCEPTS to schematic/pcb design that are unfamiliar to people doing it for the first time... I would expect going from EAGLE to KICAD to be easier than learning KICAD from scratch (but the sum of the efforts would be greater...)
EAGLE's Script and User Language Programs ?
I use ULPs for a lot of things; they're pretty cool if you're a C programmer. Most recent hacks: parametric generation of the OSHW logo (fill in dimensions and layers, get a gear-shaped polygon.) Most frequently used: the button I have in my menu that cuts the grid size in half or doubles it without having to use the grid menu. They're great for adding capabilities that the vendor didn't include in the program itself. Being able to edit/create that text files might replace some of this (at pretty significant effort, I suspect), but not everything. (The CADSoft file formats are proprietary, but the ULP language gives you access AND utilities for manipulating almost all of the internal structure...)

OTOH, KICAD's less intimate linking between SCH and PCB would allow me (I think?) to have more than one PCB from a single schematic, which I would really like to have...

No one has mentioned the gEDA suite (also open source, and I believe conceptually similar to KICAD)
I'm working on a large (14"x12") design using PCB trace capacitive sensors. There's no way such a thing could be done in Eagle without paying a ton.
You'll be paying a ton to get the PCB made anyway :-( (one quote: $800 for the minimum 5 boards.) I do sometimes wish that the cheap EAGLE was limited based on pin count instead of size, so as to permit large but simple boards. And I wish the same were true for manufacturing the boards. Oh well.

Agent24
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by Agent24 »

westfw wrote:
There is nothing saying that KiCAD does not work on OSX
I did. I believe the phrase I used was "completely unusable." While the last binary I downloaded did run, I was looking at multi-second lagging in doing things like moving the cursor. I try every couple months, and there hasn't been any progress. "Not as well supported" appears to mean that no one is working on it beyond checking to see if it still compiles. :-(
What you said I understood to mean as it wouldn't even run, just like when I tried it on Tiger:
westfw wrote:KICAD doesn't work on my Mac :-(
However in the other post I was speaking in terms of KiCAD's 'official stance'. As I quoted from the Wiki, they say it does work, but with some performance problems. Of course since I'd never been able to get it running, I knew nothing of how it actually performs.

Major lag as you describe sounds bad indeed, although that might be down to the video card\drivers etc you have. KiCAD seems picky about them sometimes, and more-so under Linux. Not helped that Ubuntu by default uses a quite outdated package (I use a PPA now, though) Until recently it also had worse performance in Vista\7 than XP.
westfw wrote:Whichever CAD package you learn first will be the hardest. Judging from the complaints I've seen from new users, there are just a lot of CONCEPTS to schematic/pcb design that are unfamiliar to people doing it for the first time... I would expect going from EAGLE to KICAD to be easier than learning KICAD from scratch (but the sum of the efforts would be greater...)
The first EDA I ever tried was in fact Eagle. I got the Light v4.1 on a free CD with a Dick-Smith catalog, or something, and played around with it back in 2001 or so. I didn't actually make any boards with it, however.

When I started getting into PCB design seriously for my own use, I initially went straight to Eagle but then realised the size limitation was going to get in my way.

I then set about trying to find something more suitable, and preferably free. Most I found were like Eagle Light: free editions of paid software that could only do 'so much'

After that I came across gEDA and KiCAD, but chose KiCAD because it had Windows support, was free, and had no imposed limitations. Open source was not a deciding factor for me, rather a bonus which gave a happy feeling ;) - but it does have advantages of course.
westfw wrote:No one has mentioned the gEDA suite (also open source, and I believe conceptually similar to KICAD)
Actually gEDA's approach is quite different. While KiCAD is a suite of tools all in the same package from the same source code and authors, gEDA is made up from multiple separate tools from different sources, that are designed to work together.

More detail on that and the advantages\disadvantages can be found here
westfw wrote:
EAGLE's Script and User Language Programs ?
Most frequently used: the button I have in my menu that cuts the grid size in half or doubles it without having to use the grid menu.


KiCAD does not have a button that does this, but it does have an easier way to change grid than Eagle. While you can go through a menu similar to that of Eagle's, you can also just right-click anywhere in the viewport and select the 'Grid' submenu from the context menu. From there you can choose from a range of common values, or a 'User size' which you can pre-set in the options.

What I find the best is you can actually use this method to change grid size while laying tracks, moving objects, etc, without having to de-select the item and lose your place - I change grid size almost all the time using that method.
westfw wrote:OTOH, KICAD's less intimate linking between SCH and PCB would allow me (I think?) to have more than one PCB from a single schematic, which I would really like to have...
Yes, you can make multiple boards from the same schematic (or rather, netlist) very easily.

adafruit
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by adafruit »

hey gang,

this is an amazing and epic thread, keep it up.

be sure to focus on what tool you use and why. stick to features and talk about how/if you switched.

yes, there are open tools and tools that are not open source (yet) - the goal is to talk about the features of both so each can improve.

thanks!
adafruit

bendelarre
 
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Re: KiCAD vs Eagle...Please help me get off the fence!

Post by bendelarre »

I've been using both KiCAD and Eagle a fair bit recently. I have to admit I've made more boards with Eagle than I have KiCAD, but am very familiar with KiCAD from building CircuitBee, which largely bases its internal format on that of KiCAD (we'll release our format specification as soon as we've stabilised it).

I have to say I'm very much in favour of open source formats for our tools, and hopefully Eagle are going to soon address that with their upcoming XML format which I am assured is definitely on the way. Though if you are making the decision about whether or not to purchase an Eagle license now, you may wish to wait for the new version since I think it will require purchasing a new license. As far as open source formats go, most of the major tooling manufacturers are still very against it, largely because of the lock-in a closed format gives them. This is a sad state of affairs, but perhaps the advent of an open XML format from CadSoft will help begin pushing everyone to an open format so that they can begin competing on features and ease of use instead of holding onto their markets via lock-in.

As a tool, personally, I have found Eagle to feel more polished, but lacking in some of the easy shortcuts that are available in KiCAD. I also dislike the requirement to match a symbol in a schematic to a specific part at schematic design time. I would much rather do as in KiCAD where I can decide what specific part to use when designing the PCB, this feels more natural to me as I don't know what size of component I'll want till I start putting together the design requirements for my boards. KiCAD does however need a bit of a user interface overhaul, it took me a while to get to grips with it, and it still feels rather clunky in places with mouse positions being picked up incorrectly and a whole bunch of bugs to do with mouse interactions between windows. Perhaps this will be coming from the community soon.

I'd recommend you try both and see what feels best to you, especially if you have small board size requirements. If you know you're going to be tackling a large project you may wish to start with KiCAD directly. As someone else mentioned before we have been working on an Eagle to KICAD converter http://www.circuitbee.com/help/eagleimport which works pretty well now, it has very few issues for most schematic designs so you should not be afraid of starting with Eagle and moving to KiCAD later if needs be. If you run into any problems with it please let me know and I'll get them fixed asap.

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