[time-nuts] OT: Eagle PC CAD now Autodesk, $500/year

[Javier Serrano]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 4:52 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist <
richard at karlquist.com> wrote:

>
> Still, the question arises:  are there any affordable alternatives?
> Don't have to be entirely free.  I am looking for any trends out
> there as to what tool will attract a critical mass of users in
> the future.  There is strength in numbers.
>
>
Disclaimer: the section I lead at CERN has been contributing to KiCad
development [1] since 2011. Our main driver is to facilitate sharing and
collaboration [2] in the domain of Open Source Hardware. As others have
said, there is quite some momentum behind KiCad these days. If you want to
give it a quick try, I think Chris Gammell's simple "Getting to blinky"
tutorial [3] is a very good place to start. Chris also runs a very lively
forum where people can ask questions [4]. KiCad does have its quirks [5]
like all other EDA tools, but it's progressing quickly and the developers
are quite receptive to constructive criticism. We want to take KiCad beyond
the hobbyist realm, and we are especially interested in feedback from
people in the designers-we-admire category like you.

Cheers,

Javier

[1] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki
[2] https://giving.web.cern.ch/content/kicad-development-1
[3] https://contextualelectronics.com/learning/getting-to-blinky-4-0/
[4] https://forum.kicad.info/
[5] See e.g. the list we keep at
http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/UI_improvements