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Comment by qume | Hacker News Reader

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qume·

Brilliant!

Can't wait for KiCAD to become more mainstream. Projects like this will definitely help.

Great work guys, fantastic.

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KiCAD is still missing basic features like via stiching. It's coming, but I can't wait for it to arrive.

Also, where is he getting the FE310?

Kicad is only viable if your time is worth less than money - basically only if you're doing the simplest kinds of boards.

If Kicad were as good as GCC, we'd have a revolution.

I understand what you're trying to say, but on the other hand I've completed around 10 boards in the last year using only KiCAD and have loved the experience. I don't think I left anything on the table which would have been there had I used commercial software. But good point, i'm only doing basic boards.

GCC didn't used to be as good as GCC is now ;)

So what do you recommend instead? I think KiCad is still not a bad choice for hobbyist use.

There really aren't any good ecad packages for low prices (at least not that I ever heard of it). All cheap packages are just glorified 2D drawing programs (e.g. eagle, target).

Even some of the expensive EDA packages can be rather user unfriendly. I've just started a new job where we use Cadence Orcad so I'm having to learn that. It's not exactly intuitive.

I found all I used (eagle, kicad, target, protel) not intuitive to use and not very user friendly (which is said about almost every CAD package), but within even that group there are massive differences in capability.

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