KiCad is an open source PCB layout program. It’s not as well loved as Eagle, but there’s no restrictions on board size. Curiousinventor’s KiCad tutorial covers many of the common issues new users will encounter.
Thanks Kelvin! Via the tips line.
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Being curious about it, I tried KiCad but was quite disapointed about it’s drawing speed. The rendering of the more complex video-card example included with it (KiCad\share\demos\video) takes about 5 seconds on my quite new PC. Every time I zoom on the .brd file performs this slow drawing not only once, but several times. At one point, the program kept redrawing continuously, making it unusable.
Ok, it seems this was a problem of the January version I tested. The end of March release is very fast. Will have to take another look :)
I was about to reply I use it on an slow Atom based machine mostly and have no issues ;-)
The January 2011 version on Fedora14 64bit works super fast .. if there is just a way to assign PAN to work with middle button …
KiCAD doesn’t run on OSX. Why hasn’t someone ported it? OSX is still Unix…
http://kicad.sourceforge.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X/Building
or it looks like there are binaries just not official:
http://kicad.sourceforge.net/wiki/Downloads
Thanks. I looked on the site, but found nothing. Unofficial is better than nothing, I guess. I probably won’t have time to check it out, though, since I’ve already paid for an Eagle license.
It works, but it doesn’t work anywhere near good enough for practical use. I got my binaries from http://brokentoaster.com/kicad/ but now use KiCad on Ubuntu under VMware.
Hi guys, i prefer kicad over eagle, i know i know the library isn’t as good as eagle and still have some things to polish but i learned to use it faster than eagle and have built in 3D rendering ( i think the recent version of eagle also have 3d rendering no external install required)
Anyways here i’ll post a tutorial that helped me a lot in the learning process. (in spanish)
http://www.ucontrol.com.ar/forosmf/tutoriales-guias-y-cursos-en-ucontrol/diseno-de-circuitos-impresos-con-kicad/
Also ucontrol is a spanish speaking magazine that can be downloaded in pdf for free and is abaut electronics, microcontrollers(pics mostly), etc
Thanks for everything and sorry for the misspelling (i’m at work and quickly posting T_T)
Despite the fact that the OS X version is quite buggy and the library system is a mess, I love KiCad much more than Eagle. I’m using it under Ubuntu under VMWare. The user interface is a lot better and feels less outdated than Eagle. Keyboard shortcuts are easy to remember and it is easy to switch between metric/imperial, grid sizes and layers.
I used this tutorial to learn the basics: http://teholabs.com/knowledge/kicad.html
Hooray I helped someone! You made my day.
That tutorial is how I got my start in Kicad too! Thanks so much! It really made it clear to me how easy it is to add new modules. Now designing a commercial PCBs and looking towards contributing code to improve Kicad.