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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Do any professionals here use it? I did some AutoCAD in high school and tried this years ago. It felt competent and less crashy than late 90s AutoCAD, but a little more awkward.

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We are using it for essentially all of our prototype boards here at Oxide (low complexity, low layer count) -- and keeping a very close eye on it for our larger boards, where we still suffer from proprietary software. (And to be clear, when I say "suffer", I don't mean the mere principle but the true pathologies of proprietary software: license servers dying; licenses expiring incorrectly; software dying, costing lost work; formats being proprietary; etc. etc., all of which we saw over the course of building our boards.) We've been waiting for KiCAD 6 for a while, and while it's not yet to the point that we can use it for everything, it's definitely on the right trajectory!

If you don’t mind me asking, what EDA tool are you guys using at the moment at Oxide for your motherboards?

Sorry, missed this question! We are (like many/most?) using OrCAD for schematic capture and Allegro for layout -- which is to say, Cadence and Cadence.

Yeah, 5.x has been our standard at $dayjob for a while; we have a few Altium seats for high-end stuff, but most of our day-to-day prototype stuff is done in Kicad. We've completely ditched Eagle.

And obviously for my after-hours stuff it's all kicad, all the time. I've been playing with 5.99 for a while and I'm very excited for a 6.0.0 stable.

KiCAD is and "EDA tool" for designing electronic circuits and circuit boards.

I'd recommend QCad for pure 2D CAD otherwise. I like it and use it a lot. I've never tried classic AutoCAD but I've been told that they are similar.

Yes. Not suitable for very high density designs yet, like a motherboard. But you can layout high-speed differential designs with more effort than, say, Altium. But these tools with good auto-routing are very expensive.

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