So I just started making some simple PCBs and the common feedback: why eagle?!? Well the answer is it’s the only one I know how to use.
I use the term “know how to use” very very loosely here but I know just enough to get a pcb ordered.
So how about it, anyone interested in hosting a kicad workshop for beginners like me? Or are you interested in a workshop like this?
KiCAD runs on Linux, so I’m in!
I’d be in for a workshop…
I would love to do a workshop on PCB design
Very interested in learning PCB design as well. However, my skills in
electronics are quite primitive.
Me too @rsim! I do everything in eagle mostly because I just don’t have the time to convert myself…
BTW @wander you can skip the electronics part by taking an existing schematic eg. an arduino and another schematic eg. a shield and merging them in the same way as though they were plugged together. You then start with a blank pcb and place and route to your hearts content knowing the schematic is a known good.
I’m in too!
I’m in!
Yup. Count me in
me too
Seems like the best way to do this might be to work through a few tutorials as a group. We don’t have people with enough time to run a workshop me thinks. We did this with blender a few years back, worked well.
This article gives a good comparison of the two products.
Personally I prefer Kicad over Eagle. The interface seems more naturally intuitive to me, especially when placing components. It is hard to explain, but the parts actually snap to the grid instead of just staying where the mouse moves them then snapping afterwards. Eagle is more from the AutoCAD command line era where you relied on the keyboard to do most of the fine control of parts.
CERN has made major contributions to the development of Kicad in the past few years too. It is true open source and the files it creates are an open, human readable format (ASCII text).
The biggest advantage of Eagle is the HUGE library of parts that have been contributed over the years. If you can think of a part it can probably be found already made by someone.
Damn, it feels like I need to get on this as well…
I’m in!
Hmmm a lot of interest, but no action.
Does anyone actually have enough experience with KiCAD that they would be willing to run a workshop? Maybe we should do a workgroup session instead?
I’ve been fiddling with it for about a month now and had a board made, but I still feel like a total noob. I could maybe talk about the software itself a bit, but I lack the design experience and knowledge of best practices for actually creating boards.
We were discussing this about a week ago - I suggested holding off for a short while, as the Kicad devs are currently very, very close to a stable build for the first time in years. There was supposed to be a RC made last week, but a crash came in; it sounds like it’ll now happen in the next few days. I’m assuming the non-RC stable build will be still a few weeks off at least, but even the RC will provide a good consistent base for all platforms (i.e. right now python scripting is disabled in most OS X builds, but that’ll be changing with the RC’s).
It’s unfortunately been a while since I did any heavy Kicad work, so I’m not a good candidate for running a class, but would be up for a group session.
I’m in for a class/workshop.
@rsim Seems like the new RC is gonna be a while yet. There’s been lots of development but I haven’t seen anything on the IRC channel in the last two weeks about it being released within a definitive timeline. It’s just being continuously delayed by new bugs, some of which are fatal and very hard to reproduce.
These are the critical bugs currently delaying a RC.
I think we should just go ahead and do the workshop with the old stable release. I don’t think it will make a big difference since the workflow and UI probably won’t change significantly with a new revision.
Yeah. 
I’ve been back to using KiCad (latest nightlies) heavily for the past week, and it’s in a really, really bad state. There are a lot more than just those 3 crash bugs, many of which are easily reproducible. I’m literally running KiCad on OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu in order to get past blocking crashes in certain areas on each platform (Ubuntu is the most stable, but also the most inconvenient from a development perspective). I’m going to try to find time this weekend to take a crack at fixing some of them and submit patches where possible.
I’d say however that despite the incredible lack of stability, it’s so vastly different than the old stable that there is no reason to learn on stable at this point, as switching will be practically like learning a new tool again.