sporniket wrote: Fri Dec 10, 2021 6:01 pm
insert here "it's time to move to Kicad" song
Well, maybe not for your biggest projects, where your familiarity with Eagle and it's weaknesses and how to work around them is more important, but maybe try to do the relocator on Kicad as well as on Eagle, to get the hang of things.
That said, maybe wait for version 6.
I did try it some months ago and it is certainly getting a lot better. But I literally have hundreds of PCBs in eagle and have been using it since version 4 wayyyyy back, not so simple to just jump ship.
But like you say, I know the problems with it and can work around them. Moving to a different program could may well have its own issues and problems of course take time to work out. Because I am familiar with Eagle, I can just go to it and do my PCB. In kicad, will probably take me some hours how to work out how to change routing tool
It really needs to have a eagle "skin" if it was familiar like that they will probably make me personally move to it as I don't have to relearn how to design PCBs again.
I would definitely recommend anyone starting out with PCB design to use Kicad. Eagle has just become a total disaster in recent years. I think the problem with eagle is nobody has really done huge projects in it like a motherboard. It just runs incredibly slow. I think back in the early days of me doing smaller boards I did not notice the bugs as much as I do now. While eagle might have some interesting and potentially very useful tools, every single one of them is broken as I pointed out in my video, even the most basic routing tools are also now broken.
There are options which just blatantly seem to be missing and you could right click to cycle through track angle styles individually in version 7, in version 9 it only seems to toggle between two different angles which just makes it more work than having to select them manually every time. I don't know if there are settings for that anywhere, but I just really cannot be bothered to go and look any more.
The only thing which does seem to work and I like over version 7 is the automatic highlight of DRC errors. Though this is somewhat countermanded by the fact that Eagle itself causes most of the DRC errors in the first place
If I ever get enough time presumably still doing circuit boards in the future, and assuming there are better versions of Kicad, and I may well sit down and start converting my stuff over to it. But with things like the H5 motherboard, while this does seem to convert over, but would I really trust it to send the gerbers off to fab after a direct copy ...
If Kicad had some more automated routing tools like Eagle 9 has (I think I mentioned this before a while ago) and bring the functionality of Eagle 9 but actually works in Kicad, then I may be tempted to jump ship a lot sooner. But I'm not sure this will really happen because it is part of the autorouter system which Kicad doesn't seem to have anything working in that respect. There was some weird add-on years ago but I never got back to work and I think it was abandoned a long time ago.
