Too few Symbols/Footprints ?

[IamSynthetiC]

Greetings, I first started designing my own board and schematics on EasyEDA, then i moved to KiCAD, and finaly to Altium. One thing i liked about KiCAD is its simplicity, its vast collection of symbols and footprints, and they way i can associate one with the other through the footprint manager. That way, making a schematic is very easy.

When it comes to designing the PCB though, i prefer Altium. But I feel Altium lacks the variety of symbols and footprints KiCAD offers. and I find myself spending more time building them from scratch, or searching for them online. And that feels wrong, for a program of that calliber to not have an equally or more effecient way than a free one. Am I doing something wrong ?


 

[penfold]

Library structures, schematic symbols and PCB footprints tend to be quite company specific, so Altium along with its predominantly commercial user-base would probably be very reluctant to share anything 'useful' a) because there's a lot of effort that must go into making sure there are no problems b) a lot of effort in making sure every part is readily configures to any 'house styles' and c) there's a lot of 'value' in a good library part and commercial guys would be understandably unwilling to share... and that hefty price tag certainly doesn't encourage any community support for hobbyists

Its a bit of a pain to adjust to different footprint editors so I do feel your pain, but if you go through some of the library part creation tutorials and get used to doing it, it does get easier! The part creation wizards can be helpful and many manufacturers are starting to release libraries of their parts (Wurth Electronik libraries are pretty useful)