The one thing I was disappointed about was his lack of working within the KiCad EDA to fully work with the Push and Shove router.
Changing the grid, to the grid that was used in the design, would have pushed all the traces into alignment.
One click of “Clean up Tracks and Vias” would have deleted many of the unconnected artifacts (I forget what he called them).
One hour is not enough time to get used to the Warp and Zoom function of the mouse; one of KiCad’s most awesome features once one figures it out.
I think it would have been nice if the forum users here were invited to his messenger service; as 1 hour is not enough time to learn KiCad even with some form of cheat-sheet.
To give some context, he has used kicad before, but in limited capacity, He also worked at altium for many years, so he is used to that tools quirks,
Like I went over in the thread, the bug tracker is the best way to handle any grievances, and things like hotkey profiles for new users coming from those tools may be able to speed up commercial migration,
He complains during several minutes he can’t change unit inside dialogs while he even doesn’t need to : Typing “15mil” or “10th” or “2mm” in any PCBnew dialog gets the correct distance automagically, no matter the selected unit.
Efcis, that one I have to call you out on, as an active Kicad user, I had no idea that existed, equally part of the design rules screen currently does not allow you to type units. (just updated the bug report for that)
It was added quite late in the v5 development cycle (a few weeks before the feature freeze)
Even if you ran nightlies you had a very short time to discover it. (Half a year or so)
There was discussion on the mailing list of how to make this feature more obvious. I don’t think they came up with a satisfying solution for that.
Oh, now I see. It works in the Net Classes tab, but not identically to most other value fields where the value is updated when you move to another field.
I always thought a better name would have been EEVRant! I haven’t watched the video as I usually can’t stand to watch his videos. They’d usually be half the length without the ranting. Of the few videos of his I have watched some tear downs were interesting but some of his tutorials were just plain wrong. I loved his “magic” voltage doubler! He couldn’t explain how it worked because it didn’t. And his episode on decoupling caps was … painful.
I thought of bringing that video up here when it first came out but decided against it because halfway through the first comment on the blog I knew I wasn’t going to watch it. Dave makes a living on Youtube clicks. He has his fan club that will click on anything and eat up his xxxx. He just dives into something and you sit there watching him fumbling around complaining things aren’t done the way he would do it, which is obviously superior. He rants about fan boys but can’t live without them.
Of course I had no idea the direction this thread would go when I posted the OP. What I realize now is that he should not complain without showing how it was done in Altium.
@1.21Gigawatts Dave Jones Ranted for several minutes about not being able to right-mouse-click to change the zone settings. Dave never explained how that works with Altium especially since the zone setting selection in KiCad seems fine to me when there are zones within zones; and zone settings should be, for the most part, a one time selection to make the settings.
@hermit The fact is that Dave Jones has a following, even if they are zombie minded fanboys, getting them and their friends interested in KiCad only helps KiCad become more prominent in the Pcb EDA field.
Steady on fellas. Zombie minded fanboys is a bit harsh and here am I reading ‘criticize ideas, not people’ in the little yellow box as I post. I thought his review was actually quite positive.
KiCad is awesome, but not perfect, nothing is. Any feedback is good and can be taken on board, or not.
Yes, in the few videos I have watched he is never content with just mentioning that something isn’t quite to his liking or could be improved, he dwells on it excessively. And in my opinion that detracts from any of the positive things he might actually say.
At the risk have having this forum inundated with more people complaining that KiCad doesn’t work the way they expect it to.
While none of my comments were directed at his followers, some of the comments I read below his videos does make you wonder. But I agree, it’s probably a little harsh and doesn’t apply to them all.
Agreed, but there is a difference between feedback and incessant ranting about trivial issues.
@Roger_Henderson My post specifically addressed 2 members of this forum to specify that my comments were my replies to the comments they had already made; and were not “general” comments towards all forum members.
If @hermit thinks my comment was both, not funny, and not politically correct enough I will edit my post.
Yes, but I expect they will be overwhelmed by the current forum user base that replies that any new user can do the work to make KiCad be the future KiCad that they want it to be.
My remark was perhaps a tad harsh. Nothing against Dave. Like anyone else, I don’t have to agree with him on everything. He has built his niche and it is a tough one to maintain. Maybe Utoob’s new policy to drop financial incentive on channels without sufficient subscribers will help improve the signal to noise ratio which would take the pressure off to do quantity of quality.
