Eagle goes rogue

[suicidaleggroll]

Creating parts in KiCad is pretty much the same as creating parts in any other EDA I've tried. You draw the schematic symbol in the library editor and you use the module editor to create and name the pads, draw the outline, etc. Eagle and KiCad are really very similar, all of the professional grade EDAs work very similarly, going from one to another is just a matter of learning the quirks.

It would be a pain to do components if you work with FPGAs. Do 484 pin component just eats time, especially when one pins has like 3 options. I guess there is also no way to import from other CADs?

I did that once, and then wrote a script to do it for me from then on (at least for Xilinx).  Now doing a 484 or 676 or whatever pin FPGA takes no more than 2-3 minutes with KiCAD with zero errors.  It helps that all of KiCAD's files are plain ASCII, so you can create or edit them however you like.

[julianhigginson]

I was just checking out the subscription page, and thought that $20/month would be handy if I ever wanted to work on eagle files. The big limitation is 2 signal layers, but if a power plane can be split to hold a couple of different power nets (can it??) that would be OK for a lot of projects.

And even the pro version is only $90/month. It'll mean that people like me can cheaply get their hands on Eagle to do a paid job if needed, without having to buy the full license, and just charge the rental of the license to the customer.. Compared to the old pricing model which I looked at ages ago and had about 10 different price points with different levels of features, I think this is an improvement.

The free version now seems able to be used professionally, but has the free version always been so terribly limited? - 2 schematic sheets?? yikes. I can see how makers will be annoyed if work done in their older free version of the software can no longer be used in the new free version..

I wonder what happens to everyone who owns a perpetual license for an older version?

[julianhigginson]

As it happens, I am just now writing an Eagle-to-KiCad conversion tool. I wonder how long they will keep the file format open, could be a waste of time!

well, if they really piss people off, or scare them away, I guess right now is the time where the conversion tool would be needed. On existing files.

Altium does an OK job of importing ASCII eagle projects too.... (though I have this niggling feeling there's also binary eagle format that eagle users can choose to save in?) I imported the EEZ-PSU project to have a look and it handled that mostly OK with a few spun around connectors. That could be an interesting project to test your converter on.. it has 3 different PCBs in one file, and a pile of schematic sheets in the one schematic file that relate to different boards in the PCB... if your converter can handle that it can handle anything! :-)

[westfw]

limitation is 2 signal layers, but if a power plane can be split

A power plane would count as a separate layer in Eagle.   2 layers means two layer PCBs, not two signal layers in the CAD package.

The free version now seems able to be used professionally

The free version is NOT ALLOWED to be used professionally.  Non-commercial use only.

has the free version always been so terribly limited? - 2 schematic sheets??

It used to be limited to one schematic sheet (of infinite size...)  This has never particularly struck me as a limiting restriction.

It used to be that $49 (then $69) would upgrade you from the free non-commercial version to the low-end commercial license (which had the same physical limitations.)  So if you designed an Arduino shield as a hobbyist and suddenly everyone wanted to buy it, you could shell out a bit of cash and be all legal and moral to sell PCBs on Tindie, or in your web store, or whatever.

[julianhigginson]

A power plane would count as a separate layer in Eagle.   2 layers means two layer PCBs, not two signal layers in the CAD package.

aaah - so by "signal layer" they mean *ANY* metal layer on the PCB? that's, well... the politest way i can describe that would be to call it "alternative terminology"

In that case, the $20/month version is pretty useless for anyone doing anything moderately interesting. Still. nice to know I can temporarily grab the full version for 90/month if I ever need it.

The free version is NOT ALLOWED to be used professionally.  Non-commercial use only.

http://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/free-download

"Download free version of EAGLE
PCB design software for students, makers, and professionals."

I haven't read terms past this download page, and I know what the rule used to be, but if you can't use it for professional work then it is NOT free software for professionals, and at very least they'll need to fix this page.

It used to be limited to one schematic sheet (of infinite size...)  This has never particularly struck me as a limiting restriction.

aaargh!!! the horror!

[Sal Ammoniac]

Allegro combines Best-of-Breed Design and Analysis Tools with a Co-Design Methodology Across All Three Design Domains

Typical marketing buzzword bullshit. I'm surprised they didn't use "synergy" as well.

[james_s]

Allegro combines Best-of-Breed Design and Analysis Tools with a Co-Design Methodology Across All Three Design Domains

Typical marketing buzzword bullshit. I'm surprised they didn't use "synergy" as well.

Wow, that's right out of the corporate BS generator.

http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live

At a place I used to work, the CEO would send out emails now and then that sounded exactly like they were written by that. We would all look at each other and snicker whenever one came on.

[xrunner]

Wow, that's right out of the corporate BS generator.

Mission Statement Generator

[james_s]

Mission Statement Generator

Hah! Armed with this, I'm all set to become CEO of a fortune 500 company

[legacy]

Typical marketing buzzword bullshit. I'm surprised they didn't use "synergy" as well.

I was looking for an EDA software for my HPUX v11.11 2xPA8900@1.1Ghz UNIX workstation.
Just because I am curious, but it's 10 orders over the definition of "expensive", so I am putting linux and KiCAD on it

Have you ever used Synergy ? If yes, where? UNIX? HP? IBM? SUN?

[AndyC_772]

played with OrCad at work

What do you think about OrCAD ?

I use it every day professionally - Capture and PCB Designer, which is the entry level version of Allegro.

IIRC you can now rent this package for about £600/year here in the UK. I have a perpetual licence which was around £2000.

[Scrts]

played with OrCad at work

What do you think about OrCAD ?

I use it every day professionally - Capture and PCB Designer, which is the entry level version of Allegro.

IIRC you can now rent this package for about £600/year here in the UK. I have a perpetual licence which was around £2000.

I have used Allegro HDL from Cadence for my work as automotive HW engineer. It's powerful tool with lots of custom integration we had, however I really liked Altium more.

[james_s]

played with OrCad at work

What do you think about OrCAD ?

I use it every day professionally - Capture and PCB Designer, which is the entry level version of Allegro.

IIRC you can now rent this package for about £600/year here in the UK. I have a perpetual licence which was around £2000.

£2000 for a perpetual license is a bargain compared to £600 a year. PCB technology has not changed much in a while, I'm not even sure what new features a CAD company could come up with to entice me to upgrade if I already had paid a bundle for a license. That's only going to get more true I suspect, which is why everyone is so keen on going to the subscription model. Thankfully with open source offerings getting better all the time, the ball is in our court.

[AndyC_772]

I felt much the same. The cost of rental is actually about the same as the (optional) annual maintenance and support fee for the perpetual licence, which I decided not to continue with this year as the updates coming out just weren't that useful to me. I have a tool now which works and which does everything I need.

There are a *lot* of additional features in the higher licence variants, though. If you ever find yourself thinking that an open-source tool might be somewhere near 'complete', just compare its feature set, performance and usability to something like Orcad PCB Designer Professional, which is about £4000 to buy.

[james_s]

Well the open source stuff doesn't yet match the high dollar pro stuff but it's getting closer all the time and for all but the most hard core hobbyists it's good enough. Big companies doing high end stuff will always be able to afford to pay for the top end software, that has always been out of the hobbyist reach anyway.

I've observed a trend with software in general, having been a computer enthusiast since the mid 80s. For a long time I eagerly anticipated the next version of practically anything. I drooled over the new features it would add, new capabilities it would give me, newer was always better. The same was true of hardware, a brand new top of the line machine was fast but never quite as fast as would have been nice. You never had enough RAM, hard drive was never big enough, monitor never had enough pixels or enough colors, there was *always* an upgrade on the horizon. Then sometime around a decade ago things started to plateau, productivity software pretty much had all the features people needed, for the first time ever available computing power really started to outstrip user needs. RAM got cheaper and cheaper, hard drives grew into hundreds of gigabytes and for the first time ever I started to have difficulty filling them up. I started encountering new versions of software that were actually *worse* than the versions they replaced. I got burned multiple times by this and upgrades went from something I eagerly anticipated to something I approached with caution or avoided entirely. New versions moved everything around, making arbitrary UI changes, adding useless features and/or taking away or breaking features I did use.  More recently almost everything has progressed to a rapid release cycle, QA has become largely a thing of the past, replaced with a ship it now, fix it later, fix it often mentality, a constant stream of updates that interrupt my work flow and break stuff that was working as often as they fix stuff that was broken.  Rather than a finished, tested product, software is in a perpetual beta, QA is passed on to the end user, and the product is in a constant state of flux like one of those project cars that is never finished, always being tinkered with and modified, always something half baked, zip-tied, dangling wires, accessories that aren't hooked up yet and sections of bare primer bodywork.

Well this has turned into more of a rant that I intended, I'll get off my soapbox now. 

[Bruce Abbott]

I started encountering new versions of software that were actually *worse* than the versions they replaced. I got burned multiple times by this and upgrades went from something I eagerly anticipated to something I approached with caution or avoided entirely. New versions moved everything around, making arbitrary UI changes, adding useless features and/or taking away or breaking features I did use.

There is a good reason for this. You see, the problem is that software doesn't wear out - and in an economy that relies on constant consumption of new products this is very bad news.

But don't worry, the fix is in. Modern software is designed to wear out after a fixed period, so you have to buy it again and again. This way the corporations can continue sucking at your wallet and get even richer. Ain't Capitalism wonderful?
   

[Karel]

Modern software is designed to wear out after a fixed period, so you have to buy it again and again. This way the corporations can continue sucking at your wallet and get even richer. Ain't Capitalism wonderful?

Thanks to capitalism you are free to start to write and sell your own EDA software.
With communism everybody is obliged to use one and the same product owned by the state.
And the state will decide which features are good enough for you and which bugs will be solved.
Ain't that wonderfull?

Capitalism is far from perfect but all other solutions are worse. Read some history.
Look at which countries build fences to keep people out and which countries build fences to keep their people in.

[CJay]

There's been mention on the Time Nuts mailing list of an email address where you can send your concerns about Eagle, apparently Autodesk seem to believe the subscription model is welcomed by customers.

Support.eagle@autodesk.com

(Sorry if this is a breach of some nettiquette rules but, screengrab of the relevant email body)

[james_s]

I'm not anti-capitalism, but like any system it does have flaws. It works both ways though, yes a company can try to charge whatever they want for something, but I can also decide whether or not I agree with the terms and I'm free to shop elsewhere. The more mature a software product gets, the less significant each iteration becomes so the easier it is for community developed open source software to catch up. At some point it might just be the case that software isn't worth as much as it used to be. There are only so many times one can reinvent the wheel, and since software never wears out you have to either keep finding new customers or keep convincing existing customers to buy new versions. I get that, but I'm not obligated to support a given company's business model.

[Karel]

To cut a long story short, the biggest problem with EDA software is vendor-lockin & non-standardized (and proprietary) file formats.
The only real solution for this is to make available and/or improve the already existent open-source EDA packages.
If enough companies start to donate money / programmers, the problem will be solved and we will reach something like Libreoffice which is,
at some points, maybe not as good as ms office but is still perfect for 95% of the users.

[Bruce Abbott]

If enough companies start to donate money / programmers, the problem will be solved

But why would they do that? Donating money and programmers just cuts into profits and kills their market. In a Capitalist economy, any company that gives their stuff away is cutting their own throat unless it's just a hook to get customers buying their other stuff, and/or an attempt to kill the competition so they can corner the market.

On the other side we have programmers spending a lot of time and effort to develop true open-source software simply because they think others might need it - with no expectation of any payback. That's not Capitalism, so what is it? Sound more like...

'a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.'

[Bruce Abbott]

Eagle goes rogue, so it is time to move to KiCAD...

I tried KiCAD a while back and hated it. Perhaps it's improved now? Let's see...

Oh yes, now they have a wonderful 'push and shove' router! Just one problem - for some peculiar reason it only works in OpenGL. Why would that be a problem for me? The graphic driver in my computer has OpenGL v2.0, but KiCAD needs v2.1!!! Why???

And the user interface still sucks...

[Karel]

In a Capitalist economy, any company that gives their stuff away is cutting their own throat unless it's just a hook to get customers buying their other stuff, and/or an attempt to kill the competition so they can corner the market.

So, why are the biggest contributors to Linux big "capitalistic" companies?
Because they use Linux as a tool to run their business. And there's no reason why
electronic design companies can't do the same.

[james_s]

Eagle goes rogue, so it is time to move to KiCAD...

I tried KiCAD a while back and hated it. Perhaps it's improved now? Let's see...

Oh yes, now they have a wonderful 'push and shove' router! Just one problem - for some peculiar reason it only works in OpenGL. Why would that be a problem for me? The graphic driver in my computer has OpenGL v2.0, but KiCAD needs v2.1!!! Why???

And the user interface still sucks...

Beats me, but you could buy a nice new PC dedicated to running KiCad for the cost of renting Eagle for a year or two.

The interface kinda sucks, but the Eagle interface sucks too, it's just a matter of what you're used to. I used to use Eagle but I've been using KiCad for quite a few years now and it's fine. I tried every EDA I could get my hands on and came to the conclusion that they all suck, stick with any one of them and most will do the job.

[legacy]

Well OpenGL