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I was just curious on what's nice to use? The quirks of Eagle are grinding my gears.

I've heard good and bad things about KiCad, but I haven't gotten around to using it myself.

I use expresspcb. Definitely easiest to use and has the features necessary for guitar pedals. Problem is with making the pcbs. They export a proprietary file so they can force you to manufacture with them but I just send it to future led for fabrication

Lots of folks like DipTrace.

Awesome thanks! This is a good place to start.

spruce_moose wrote:I was just curious on what's nice to use? The quirks of Eagle are grinding my gears.

i'm not saying at all that eagle doesn't have quirks, but i would point out that any moderate to advanced pcb software is going to have quite a bit of a learning curve, and will take some patience to get used too (kicad, altium, pads, etc).

I have been keen to try Altium for a while, but it does look steep. We have it at work, although if I were to leave then I'd need a licence and that's a bit unrealistic for my budget. I'll do some research on these and weight them up.

This might have partially been a rant in the small hours, but this is very helpful. Looking for pcb design software in google yielded quite a variety.

ya i have never used Altium, but it seems to have good reviews. Kicad seems pretty functional for a free program, plus it can import libraries/schems/boards from eagle iirc so you sort of get the benefits of there being a decent sized user base for both programs.

I use diptrace with a pattern library I made for myself (I hate browsing through the tens of thousands of parts to find the pattern I commonly use)

it's got its quirks but once you know them it's pretty good

cloudscapes wrote:I use diptrace with a pattern library I made for myself (I hate browsing through the tens of thousands of parts to find the pattern I commonly use)

it's got its quirks but once you know them it's pretty good

ya i just make a new library in eagle with the parts i commonly use, then disable most of the libraries that come with eagle. you can also search with wildcards in eagle which makes it pretty fast to find what you need (assuming it's there) if you include all the libraries. but to each his own. i think like with most software whatever works for you is what's good.

I'm so invested in Eagle now that I would have to have a real serious need to go with something else. I keep hearing that you can import Eagle libraries into DipTrace, but I'm skeptical because that kind of shit rarely works without lots of issues.

i drew my first pcb in photoshop because eagle seemed way to hard to learn.

That's epic.

culturejam wrote:but I'm skeptical because that kind of shit rarely works without lots of issues.

Heh, we upgraded from Protel 99 at work to Altium and the import process randomly missed some of the schematic junctions. We found this out after making 50 4-layer boards, consisting of over 1000 components each.. Whatever happened, it couldn't be that bad

There was greenwire everywhere..

I remembered another thing that drives me crazy about Eagle. The whole footprint/part creation feels like a workaround for the awful UI. People seem to act like making parts takes a couple minutes, but every time I have to do it I have to relearn the whole unintuitive process because it never stays in my head.

Element14 has eagle parts for a lot of stuff you can just download, so I hardly ever have to make custom parts. We used to use pads at work but it's completely overkill for pedals.

That's how I got the EEPROM footprint mixed up! I do find them handy, but they seldom have all packages for a part.