kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:25:16AM -0600, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> I find KiCad barely useable.  I am in no way satisfied with KiCad.  In my view it is
> however making progress, although more like 3 steps forward and 1 step back.

I do not agree with that. It's *far* from perfect, but beats every low
cost EDA package I've ever tried. YMMV, depending on the kind of board
you're doing (good luck with an heavily impedance controlled layout or
modern things like via-on-pad). I recently did an UHF design (RFID
stuff), not exactly the easiest thing but with care (and *a lot* of
review) everything worked out.

At the present time I'd say it's like autocad without any domain
specific addon, i.e. almost anything can be done but not a lot easily
and quickly.

ATM the thing still I mostly miss are inter-class design rules (i.e.
having 220VAC and 5VDC on the same board). Need a lot of time to verify
and recheck. Failures in safety certification tend to be expensive:(

Also a better 'drag trace' would be even more useful for me than the P&S
router. Maybe it's a workflow issue of mine, I don't know...

The 1 step back you are mentioning is probably due to the constant
changing evolution (for example I really don't like the new opengl view
but that's probably because it's still little more than a proof of
concept). Also probably something broke in the change module due to the
new footprint library table. More testing (a lot more) is needed. Still
I see asserts popping up sometimes when cancelling operations in pcbnew,
for example.

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl