From T3001 to KiCAD
Roger
KiCAD out of interest last spring, but did not have much time to give
it a good run. Now I have a project with about a 1000 pads, which will
mean a €1300 upgrade to my Target license. So I thought it would be
worth giving KiCAD a decent tryout, especially as I like the idea of
having control over my EDA tools (I also do some wxWidgets programming,
in fact I first discovered KiCAD on a wxWidgets site).
I will say that I find KiCAD much easier to use. I suspect that
wxWidgets has a lot to do with this, it does not suffer from the
behaviour that many CAD programs derived directly from the MFC suffer.
But **hey** don't let me detract from the great effort, clearly a lot
of good thought has gone into the making of KiCAD as well!
KiCAD also seems more mature in some areas as well. For example, the
hierachical schematic feature is better than T3001.
The biggest weakness for KiCAD wrt T3001 is the forward and back
annotation. Target let's you flip back and forth easily between
schematic and board. Mind you, I spent years using Orcad for DOS so I
think I can handle KiCAD!
What does worry me is if KiCAD really is good and stable enougth to
handle a board with 1000+ pads. I suppose I am as much a victim of FUD
as the next man. Any experience form you greatly recieved. (BTW, double
sided with SMD and PTH, components mounted on both sides of the board.
Also, what about the output? Can I just export a design pack and send
it off for prototypes or is there a lot of twiddling to do?
These are questions I would really like an answer too before I put a
lot of time into a project.
Also, I am using the 2006-04-24 realease. Is it important to upgrade or
can I saftly wait until I am back in the office with broadband?
(Currently at home on dialup).
In a nutshell, so far so good. Very good. The only thing I have not
been able to do is set up the title block as I would like it. I could
not do this in T3001 either, but I could (and did) make my own sheet
outline so that I could put my own title block in.
One thing that suprises me by it's absense (maybe it is there but
hidden) is a lack of undo/redo.
Cheers,
Roger.