2024-11-29T23:00:00Z
To escape the ‘whinging’ contributions in the KiCad forums for once, a ‘positive’ one here! I have read John Beard’s contribution about the difficulties with the historical development of KiCad and yes, I too experienced all these things in my former professional life. The contributions in the KiCad forums are usually about things that ‘don’t’, ‘don’t work as they should’, ‘or might be improved’ but almost never about things that just work…
I have been using KiCad for a few years now and have seen the evolution in making the software user-friendly. An example: The day before yesterday the new Raspberry CM5 was released to the world, I use the ‘old’ CM4 quite a lot so I was interested. The official IO-Board for these modules was always designed with KiCad so also this one for the new module. So I picked it up and looked at this official design, a good schematic usually says more than a lot of marketing blabla… So I was able to study and evaluate everything properly. I could then also look at the 3D representation of the board and that was interesting. Only, the CM5 module and the M2-ssd were not ‘assembled’ and ‘for fun’ I then ‘added’ these in the 3D representation. The official CM5 module step file was already available and after some searching I also found an M2 ‘2280’ in 3D.
I then simply connected everything together in 3D with the “Footprint properties” such that I can now conjure up a beautiful representation of this IO board with all bells & whistles.
I know how much blood, sweat and sometimes tears it takes to make such things work …but …IT just WORKS!
So the 3D processing of parts seems to work reasonably well and it really is a tool that can be used extensively in design. Nothing better to present a design to your boss or your colleagues than a nice 3D representation, a good drawing or photo says more than 20 pages of explanation, right?
So I am very grateful to the developers of KiCad for their hard work to make a working soft. Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day either, but sometimes I am really surprised…
Take a look at the 3D examples of the board below.
Jacques.
I couldn’t agree more! I have heard people say, “Eagle” is better or how KiCad doesn’t do everything, blah blah blah. I’m no KiCad expert but the program is incredible and I can’t imagine what their problem is. If you read posts on facebook you can see that if one posts a picture of a smiley face, some people will find something negative to say about it. Its unfortunately the world that we live in. However, this gem of a software package continually amazes me and it should everyone. I have never worked with a program that is more satisfying. Think about the effort that people have put in to create it and what it costs you. Okay, off of my apple box.
I’m with you both, and a big thumbs-up for the developers and community.
For Eagle users: spend your $680/year, then you have a case for complaing to Autodesk.
KiCAD is free and open.
I find it quite demoralizing, sometimes, when I open the forum and find question after question about “How (or why) do you” worded in such a way as to criticize the program.
The thought “Why are you bothering to try to use this if that is your attitude” runs through my brain.
Whinge, on the other hand, comes from a different Old English verb, hwinsian, meaning “to wail or moan discontentedly.” Whinge retains that original sense today, though nowadays it puts less emphasis on the sound of the complaining and more on the discontentment behind all the whinging and moaning.
And yes a good glass of w(h)ine and some good cheese is what makes life worth living!
But don’t make the same mistake… “We forgot the Crackers, Grommit!”
KiCad is a great piece of software in many ways, and it’s getting better and better and the 3d part is so good and useful, it looks and works probably best (very real) of the best cad software 3-d viewers
Correct but as long as you stay in KiCad, once you “export” a pcb to e.g. .step the fun begins…
This is how my design is represented in 3D-viewer, pretty neat isn’t it?
But when you export to a .step file you got all sorts of components missing, no clue why…
See what it gives in the second image with Dassault eDrawings.
So just as a conclusion… it’s fun to play with all these 3D applications and see how they do their interpretation/processing of the same file, it seems the .step file IS complete. Only the renderers take what they want to display or it is some (obscure) parameter to add and tell the renderer.
Somebody knows what renderer KiCad 3D is using?
Conclusion!
The KiCad devs did a really nice job with the 3D-viewer!
Of course if you want to use the 3D export files it becomes more tricky, so best to use a screenshot of the KiCad 3D-Viewer.
And now I’m gonna stop because I’m bombarding this blog with stupid pictures…
All 3d models for the KiCad PCB has to be in “step” format (extension .step, or .stp) to make files to be exported as complete step files. The .wrl format (which often is the chosen format in the kicad libraries, even if the step files are also included in the libraries, don’t know why they have chosen this way), the “.wrl” format doesn’t work to make complete/correct exported .step files, at least that’s what I have experienced. You can probably use a text editor (after making a backup of your files!) to replace all “.wrl” to “.step”. The Blender part is not anything I have tested, but it should be possible to get very good looking renders from there what I understand?
My first reaction is to say that I stand corrected but…
1a) I am sitting.
I checked in two different hard cover printed editions of my American Heritage Dictionary for College Idiots
and could not find whinge. So the next thing is that I think you are pulling my leg, but again that would be difficult based upon where I am sitting. I doubt that you could fit under my desk.
I giggled (or something like that) the word “whinge” and that (more or less) confirms your ludicrous claims about this “word”.
Please allow me to be pulling YOUR leg.
My niece turned me on to Wallace and Gromit some years ago. It is a winner!
I’ve posted about this before . . . but i’m happy to repeat it.
The company I work for used one seat of Solidworks PCB for PCB layout, we had one engineer that used it, it was basically Altium in a Dassault customised format with slight tweaks to the PCB file format.
At the start of the pandemic, when uncertainty was in overdrive, some employees were let go (Redundancies here in the UK) one of them being the engineer that used Solidworks PCB. A couple of years later after things had gotten back to a more normal level of chaos I investigated the options for learning Solidworks PCB and was told “sorry, we are not running training as this product is end of life”
We asked for an alternative solution for us to get access to our data and were told . . . "Altium is your best option . . . " yup, at £10k a seat we weren’t too impressed.
So in June 2023 while on holiday from work I exchanged a few messages and sent a few Solidworks PCB files to @craftyjon and he made some mods . . . and shortly after that the Nightly was able to import Solidworks PCB layout files.
This has meant a lot to me personally and to the company I work for . . . I could carry on using KiCad, which I already had some experience of, and we (as a company) could get useful access to our files without spending a lot of money in a hurry.
Will we move to Altium ? why would we ? the only thing that is missing from KiCad that we actually need is variants . . . and I an getting around that using the excellent KiVar Plugin.
When the pandemic hit we were working on a new product with a couple of small, but busy PCBs (Motor drive, RS485 comms, MSP430 MCU, etc) when this failed EMC testing I made some significant layout changes including going from 2 → 4 layer using KiCad and we now have passed EMC.
So thank you KiCad and John Evans (@craftyjon ) for your help . . .
