Circuit design software

[Rx7man]

I've been playing around designing circuits.. haven't found something I really liked yet.. didn't like Eagle... then used Mouser Multisim for a while.. that was OK, the circuit analysis was great, but a lot of the parts don't have models...

Now I've been trying Circuitmaker, which seems to be semi-online and has a pretty good parts database, and parts searchability has some improvements over Multisim... Not sold on it yet, but it's full featured and completely free.. which is kinda nice

[hakcenter]

Just get used to eagle and design your own library for parts that it doesn't have from the white papers

[Rx7man]

That's a bloody PITA too though

[hakcenter]

It's future proof and pretty much the industry standard... lol

[Rx7man]

I just find footprint libraries hard to come by.. seems like you gotta draw out the pads for every component even though there's millions of other components with the same footprint

[hakcenter]

Well that's the cool part once you're done you're done, it isn't that complicated to make pads... I just start at 0, make a copy of a pad, then offset each one the spacing

Then grab everything as a group and then center the pads over the 0 so its centered.. then draw lines around it. Honestly takes about 15 minutes to make something, if it doesn't truly exist

[Rx7man]

There should just be a footprint library.. it's stupid to have to redraw a DIP-8 every time you need to add one.. of course those are the easy ones, but the idea is the same

[Rx7man]

I just got Eagle 8... I don't know how anyone can tolerate that damn program.. I'm tearing my hair out after using it for an hour

[Rx7man]

This just came up...

[hakcenter]

lol don't use 8, use 7.7

[hakcenter]

32bit

[Rx7man]

I just downloaded KiCAD... will give that a try and see how I like it

[Rx7man]

Just briefly tried Kicad... other than an ass-backward mousewheel zoom, it seems good so far... has separate files for the footprint of a device, which is precisely what was lacking elsewhere... just search QSOP16 and there it is

I saved Eagle for future reference as well

[hakcenter]

Best get used to eagle it's what everyone and their mom uses, just avoid the whole 8.0 thing.. that's new I guess since the last time I turned it on

Pretty much all the libraries you find are for eagle, like seeedstudio's shields etc

[Rx7man]

Theres no footprint or layer limit in Kicad though.. and since I do have Mega projects to build, it is nice