Re: gEDA-user: CERN goes for KiCAD

[Attila Kinali <attila@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:10:57 +0200
Kai-Martin Knaak <knaak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> John Hudak wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, I switched to using KiCAD and it was like going from driving a FIAT
> > stick to driving a 911 stick...
> 
> Please elaborate on this one. 
> What exactly constituted the difference that made you feel like that?
> You already told us about the library/M4 thing. But there was certainly more.
> What was it?

I had a similar experience. I recently wanted to do a design that i'd
like to publish as open hardware. For that i thought it would be a good
idea to use an open source eda tool instead of the closed one i'm usually
working with. I had a look at gEDA and kicad in the process and a few others
as well. In the end, i decided that none of them was up to what i was used
to work with. gEDA has no design flow whatsoever, which makes it hard to
grasp the philosophy and get up to speed (hint: i want to do a design,
not spend weeks learning a tool before i can even place a resistor).
The UI of gschem seemed clumsy at best, but probably workable with some
time spend learning it. I frankly couldnt figure out how to use pcb
to do what i need to do. (you can call me stupid if you wish).

My kicad experience was of similar nature, though because of different reasons:
I'm used to complex designs and the need to set various paramters of my design
as i need to. kicad for some reason doesnt seem to offer that. It mostly felt
like being an OSS version of eagle. The good part of kicad was, that producing
a PCB is easily possible even if you know nothing about the tool. But getting
to more advanced features was hard to impossible within the time i tried it.

Now comes the catch: When i was a teenager, i did an electronics project
in high school. Not having access to the internet and not knowing anything
about OSS (i dont think gEDA existed back then), i got a copy of Orcad for
DOS (it was ancient even back then). But, within a day i was able to enter
my first test schematics and produce something that looked like a PCB
which we could use for trying the "production" in the chemistry lab.
It took me way over a month to do a uC based project back then, but most
of it was due to my inexperience in electronics than tool problems.
I.e. i was able to produce a quite complex design with a quite complex tool
(unless you want to tell me that Orcad is for the simple minded) with no
prior design experience and definitly no tools experience at all.

Now the question is, why isn't there any OSS EDA tool out there that
combines the availability of complex features with ease of use like
Orcad did 20 years ago?

If there were one, i'd be happy to throw money at it, to help it being
developed.

			Attila Kinali

PS: for my OH project, i decided to stick with comercial tools.


-- 
The trouble with you, Shev, is you don't say anything until you've saved
up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments and then you dump
them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap
		-- Tirin, The Dispossessed, U. Le Guin


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