[TriEmbed] Help with PCB design software choice

Martin Brooke martin.brooke at duke.edu
Wed Apr 2 08:54:11 CDT 2014


The online Kicad Tutorials you can find with Google are very helpful.

The main trick is to realize that the components in the schematic need a
pad layout associated with each of them that matches your parts, and that
is all that, in the end, matters.

Try not to get too fancy to start with.

Start with through hole parts, there are lots of DIP footprints and any
part with the same number of pins as yours will work in the schematic.

the SIP footprints work fine for through hole resistors and capacitors if
you cannot find the correct part or footprint.  You just need holes in the
board!

Once you get going you may want to learn about the design rule checker and
get fancy with making the parts in the schematic and layout tailored to
your actual parts.  This will enable you to reduce errors in the designs to
near zero.  But it is often faster to make a board quickly and fix the
errors with wire and solder later, than learn all the error checking tools
to start out.  I call it board surgery and it works well for development,
particularly if you resist the urge to get the pretty colored solder mask
painted over all your traces.

But be assured Kicad is a very nice full featured tool.  Once you get used
to it you can produce complex error free boards.  The only feature it does
not support that I notice is back annotation of simulation results to the
schematic (unless that has been added and I missed it!).







On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 9:07 AM, Carl Nobile <carl.nobile at gmail.com> wrote:

> Jose,
>
> If you are not looking to market this controller then you can still use
> Eagle. It only cost money if you need it in a real production environment.
> The learning curve on KiCad is a little more steep than Eagle, but it is
> free and has no limits. I have both installed on my Linux machine and try
> to use KiCad for new designs and Eagle when I need to see somebody else's
> design that uses Eagle. I'm not real good on either, but hey we're here to
> learn.
>
> Carl
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 8:28 AM, Bill Farrow <bill at arrowsreach.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 2:09 AM, Jose Medrano <jamedran at ncsu.edu> wrote:
>> > is...Eagle is about an order of magnitude higher than what I can pay
>> right
>> > now. Do you all have any suggestions for other good PCB software?
>>
>> Have you tried the Open Source KiCad ?
>>   http://www.kicad-pcb.org/
>>
>> Bill
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>
>
>
> --
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Carl J. Nobile (Software Engineer)
> carl.nobile at gmail.com
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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> TriEmbed web site: http://TriEmbed.org
>
>


-- 

Martin Brooke

-- 
 *Martin Brooke*
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and Philip Baugh Scholar
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