I'd like to chime in with a "third option" for PCB CAD: Fritzing. http://fritzing.org/home/ It's not nearly as full-featured as KiCad, Eagle, etc, but it has a lot going for it: -Totally free, open source, unlimited board sizes -Very easy to learn - I picked it up in an evening -Seamless forward/back annotations - PCB and schematic are continuously synchronized automatically -There's also a "breadboard view" that is synced with your PCB and schematic. Kind of a gimmick, but good for tutorials (Sparkfun uses it for this) -Integrated code editor -Single integrated tool -Multiplatform There are some drawbacks of course: -Making your own parts is rather painful -Only does 2 layers -Not frequently updated -Part library is limited It also has an autorouter, which works reasonably though probably not as advanced as in other tools (I haven't compared) Worth looking at if you're a beginner/casual hobbyist/maker . Cheers, -Leif On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 7:06 AM, Per Olofsson <magervalp@fastmail.fm> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 15, 2017, at 04:20 AM, silverdr@wfmh.org.pl wrote: >> >> Do you mean >> something like "if even autorouter can route this layout then this layout >> is better than the other one I tried before"? > > Yeah, kind of. I expect the autorouter to either fail, or do a crappy > job - it's more about how bad a job it does. E.g. if I rotate this chip, > does it get better or worse? If I straddle this DIP chip across that > connector, does it go haywire? I could spend an hour trying to route it > myself, or I can get feedback from the autorouter in 30 seconds. If I > was more experienced I'm sure I'd have more of a feel for it, but as an > amateur it's a great crutch to lean on. > > -- > Per Olofsson > magervalp@fastmail.fm > > Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2017-02-15 17:00:03
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