EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => Topic started by: Mike2020 on August 30, 2020, 06:53:27 pm
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Hello fellow EEs,
I am planning on developing an extension for PCB designers and wanted to make sure it reaches most users.
Could you please comment what tools you are using for PCB Design and Simulation, Free/Paid Tool, Company you work for/Hobby.
Please take a poll to indicate the tool you are currently using.
You can select multiple options: http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/npwejo/survey-pcb-sw-tool (http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/npwejo/survey-pcb-sw-tool)
From a 2017 survey per "Printed Circuit Design & Fab Magazine", Used weekly
•Altium Designer: (30.9%)
•Cadence Allegro: (29.9%)
•Mentor XPedition: (23.9%)
•Mentor Pads: (20.3%)
•Cadence OrCAD: (15.3%)
•Mentor Board Station: (5.6%)
•Zuken CR-5000: (5%)
•Zuken CR-8000: (2.3%)
•Eagle: (1.7%)
•Zuken CADStar: (1%)
•Other: (12%) "
I'm fairly new to these topics and would like to develop skills that are widely used in the industry.
Appreciate the response. :)
Best regards,
Mike
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The results of the survey will likely be a bit biased since it doesn't allow for one to use multiple tools.
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Thank you dunkemhigh, I fixed it with a new poll: http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/npwejo/survey-pcb-sw-tool (http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/npwejo/survey-pcb-sw-tool)
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The poll here has just 7 votes, while on polljunkie there are 40 now.
Would you like to disclose any info on what your extension is supposed to do and how it relates to "PCB designers"?
> "I'm fairly new to these topics and would like to develop skills that are widely used in the industry."
Full disclosure: I'm a biased KiCad fanboy :-+
What may be relevant to you:
As an Open Source program, you have full access to KiCad 's source codereview it and learn from it. There are also lots of other people who have ade extensions and side projects around KiCad. For example, this page on github has a manually moderated list of 60+ projects:
https://github.com/xesscorp/kicad-3rd-party-tools
As an Open Source project, you also have full access to KiCad's file format. Files are also in easily parsible plain text which makes scripting easier and also allows for search and replace operations with a text editor.
Documentation to the file formats is on:
https://kicad-pcb.org/help/file-formats/