Anyone else getting a little overwhelmed with the amount of CAD programs out there these days? Reminds me of that XKCD comic about 14 competing standards.
Have they ever fixed the usability issues? I tried it like 5 years ago and it was pretty terrible. Not as bad as gEDA or Eagle but still, worse than DesignSpark PCB for example, and the people that wrote that thought warping your mouse was a reasonable thing to do.
Eventually I found Horizon EDA which is basically the Kicad engine with a mostly fixed UX (it still has some quirks). But that’s pretty much a one man project so it would be nice if Kicad actually improved.
I’ve been using it as my only EDA the last three years or so, and I can tell you it is much better than it was eleven-ish years go, and each major version has been better than the last. I have some plugins that have been broken for a couple major versions if I recall, which kind of sucks. Some functions still aren’t offered - thus the plugins. I make extensive use of the 3D models, and often export to FreeCAD for enclosure design. FreeCAD’s UX is worse than KiCAD’s UX.
Freecad 1.0+ is a significant improvement on the ux front but the ui and workflow still need work
I agree, I tried FreeCAD a couple of years ago and it was unusable. I tried 1.0 and it was actually decent. Not amazing but definitely usable.
IIRC when you dragged a component in the schematic view all of the wires would get left behind. Have they fixed face-palms like that?
I think there’s a different hotkey for that, maybe G. M doesn’t bring your wires. I don’t use click-dragging, so I’m not sure. It’s also been about two months since I’ve worked in KiCAD
I would consider it still horribly broken if you have to use a special hotkey to get sane behaviour.
I don’t agree that dragging keeping wires is sane behavior. There may be preferences to modify. I like the hotkeys because it’s much faster than context menus. I’m also the type to use AutoCAD commands for everything instead of the ribbon.
The biggest issue years ago was selecting footprints after schematic design before board layout. Now you can choose from a drop-down as you draw your schematic.
I don’t agree that dragging keeping wires is sane behavior.
Well… I’m afraid you’re wrong about that. It’s the behaviour almost all users expect, it’s the most useful behaviour, and it’s the behaviour of virtually all software that has wire-like interfaces.
Can you imagine if all the nodes in Blender disconnected every time you moved them? Ridiculous.
It’s been highly usable for me over the past couple years. Better than Protel was … back when it was Protel, I guess
A while back I was looking for a FOSS EDA and saw overwhelming support for Kicad, but some people reluctantly supported it exactly due to poor UX/UI. I was looking for something easy to pick up and I stumbled on LibrePCB and they are very user friendly to me. If you need particularly advanced features or depend on large existing libraries it may not be for you but for smaller hobby projects I think it’s great.
Perhaps worth a shot?
In December they pushed a pretty big update with many new features: https://librepcb.org/blog/2024-12-01_release_1.2.0/
Ah yeah LibrePCB is the only one I haven’t tried actually. I guess I was put off by the name - I’ve found that projects that focus on geeky freedom tend to not care at all about UX, but it sounds like that isn’t the case here so I’ll definitely give it a shot, thanks!
Not to hijack, but what are the well-known cheap companies that will take a standard PCB output format, create the board and place the components and then pop it in the post. Assuming sensible MOQs. I’m in the UK, so I guess it’d be China rather than UK / EU. Though there’d be lead solder issues I’m sure.
PCBway does this I’m pretty sure, I used a service a year or 2 ago for a project that did and I’m fairly certain it was them
Edit:
It was a service called JLCPCB, a very nice service IMO
