ECAD Recommendation - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: PixieDust
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2019, 05:11:10 am
content: Hi everyone, I'm in the process of buying my first CAD for PCB design and need some recommendations. It seems Altium is the ultimate product but it also comes at an ultimate price. I'm not a professional electrical engineer and need something that will work for my simple projects. I don't foresee anything overly complex. Mostly single sided, 1 layer designs. Ideally I want something that will talk to Solidworks, so I've been looking into Solidworks PCB (Altium Circuit Studio) (the only problem is I can't find a reseller for it at the moment), so maybe I'll have to go for Altium Circuit Studio and hopefully it works with Solidworks.After reading a few threads about its limitations I'm not sure if it's the right choice as seen below from one of the threads:Quote from: dluberger on November 05, 2017, 04:24:35 pmI don't really have much experience to fall back on in terms of relating to most of those issues. The only real issue that I'm a bit worried about is non round pads. I'm planning on making my own PCBs and don't have means to be super precise with my designs, so a lot of the time I'll have strange non round pads to increase contact surface area as much as possible. Having said that, I will need to do square pads for Surface Mount components so it seems like Circuit Studio won't work for me, but I'm not sure.

author: pointhi
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2019, 08:13:11 am
content: If you are not sure, just try KiCad (http://kicad.org/). It's free after all and capable enough for most designs.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2019, 08:10:13 pm
content: P99SE will do everything for you!

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2019, 08:45:08 pm
content: Quote from: pointhi on April 30, 2019, 08:13:11 amI agree. For relatively simple boards a more simple program may be a good option. The learning curve will be steep enough already. If you are looking at Altium anyway then also look at Orcad.

author: PixieDust
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2019, 07:14:24 am
content: Thanks guys, will, try KiCAD. 1Gb download, that's an impressive size for a free package. I realised relatively recently that you need to start at the beginning. Although Altium and probably a few other packages will allow me to do absolutely anything, I certainly haven't reached a level requiring all those features, no point going for that just yet.

author: Geoff_S
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2019, 11:35:36 am
content: Consider giving DipTrace a try. Free version available for limited pins/layers (500 pins, 2 layers I think ?), and low cost if you need to go beyond those. More than capable of handling low end hobbiest projects.

author: Lukas
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2019, 07:40:26 pm
content: Shameless plug: If you're not afraid of using an EDA package that doesn't have a proper version number yet, you may want to give horizon EDA a try:https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/wip/index.html