kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx>]

> On Nov 3, 2015, at 8:12 PM, timofonic timofonic <timofonic@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hello
> 
> I'm just a lurker and still not started to contribute, but I have some ideas:
> 
> - Indian Institute of Technology Bombay: I see technological and educational institutions as potential contributors at this stage of development. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay developed the Oscad package and showed a very good attitude towards collaboration, I think they must go to FOSSDEM and talk very seriously about a long term collaboration plan.
> - Improving usability: I think UX should be taken under a very serious objective analysis by an independent group to make KiCad more popular, OpenUsability.org seems a good candidate. Old schoolers and some developers might resist to change, but KiCad's UX is one of the things that still make people uncomfortable to use it.
> - QUCS: It seems a great project with innovation in their core ideas. I think there should be some collaboration. It seems there are issues about SPICE models being copyrighted so they have to use script downloaders, this would make a future KiCad library with all components available in SPICE/Verilog-A a very hard challenge until solved.
> - Organization: Are there clear roles in KiCad? Wayne is the project manager and there are translators, that's all I know. Are there main or specific roles in the team? What about a fast voting process to take decisions? Are there a formal meritocratic core team?
> - Wiki: What about using a wiki for documentation? It provides an easier to use environment,  it can be customized for i18n and even parsing KiCad files to show them  as SVG if someone writes a plugin for it. The documentation could be exported and shipped in each release, too.

Let me add my input as a professional (does-it-for-a-living) EE with nearly 30 years of experience. (Holy moly! How did that happen?)

Regarding integrating any kind of simulation tool into the mainline PCB design package, I suggest the following: DON’T BOTHER. Why? Because board design and circuit simulation are two different processes with different goals. Altium offers it, nobody uses it. 

The problem is that the things that you need to do a proper simulation are not relevant to layout. Assuming a SPICE engine, you need the simulation control cards, you need models for everything, and you need the stimulus. And then there are the things that you need to make a functioning circuit board that you can’t simulate. So you have to work out how to make things like connectors and such vanish from the simulation netlist, and you need to do the same for the stimulus sources and such from the layout netlist. Perhaps someone can explain how to use SPICE to simulate only the DAC output reconstruction filter or a mic preamp that is integrated in a design with the converters and a processor and other stuff, then maybe we can have this discussion.

And further: the world really doesn’t need another SPICE simulator. Every professional I know uses the free (as in beer) LTSpice. It runs on Windows, Macs and Linux. You can add third-party models. It really just does work. Is it Open Source? No. Does that matter? Only if you’re Richard Stallman. The rest of us have work to do. (There’s another free alternative for OS X users in MacSpice, which doesn’t have its own schematic editor.) What do I want? A robust PCB design package that can handle designs of any complexity and specialist design rules. Integrating a VHDL or SPICE simulator gets in the way of that. (Again, Altium: it has all of that extra crap that nobody uses and the users complain about bugs that go unfixed for years while Altium adds an 8051 compiler.)

Regarding usability: Yes, of course usability is important. But who should determine how the user interface should be implemented? My vote is that people who’ve spent years in the trenches of board design are those whose ideas you want to capture. Sorry, newbies to PCB layout don’t get to tell the vets how the program should work. Harsh? Sure. My pals in the live sound business call it the Anvil Of Reality. There’s always some kid who thinks he can step up to a rig in a theatre and mix a show without having the experience of working the clubs. They always get told “no,” because the kids don’t know what they don’t know.

The other topics have been covered by Wayne and others.

-a