Oh, I definitely have my own collection of verified / self-made footprints. I do verify every footprint from KiCAD I use if I don’t make it myself.
A small story of a PEBCAK with a QFP…: 2 Months ago, for a personal project on vintage hardware (pocket computers) I wasn’t as vigilant as usual and integrated a 82C55A Chip in my design , which was a, according to its short description (yep, I , idiotically, didn’t look into the datasheet for once ), QFP-44 10x10mm 0.8p (mm) as standard as they come.
JLCPCB PCBA didn’t have this chip in stock for the assembly, so I asked them to leave only this chip out, make the PCBs and do the assembly will all the other components. I had plenty of 82C55A at home. When I got the assembled PCBs back and I tried to solder the QFP onto the board I was confronted with a problem that the chip wouldn’t fit! Pitch was perfect , dimensions of the body , perfect too, but the pins were going further out than the footprint!
The right footprint in the KicAD standard lib was a LQFP-44 10x10mm 0.8p, but that didn’t matter. IN the Datasheet I didn’t open, was the distance from left pin to right pin (14mm something instead of 12 something) I should have checked.
Most of the times when I don’t follow my own advice — (in addition to standard verification) to print out on a sheet of paper the PCB and assemble the components to check out the footprints — a mistake will bite my rear.
This event set me back $37 and 20 days. At least I got an example to tell my students
I really think, libraries are completely over estimated. You get 10.000 Parts delivered but the one you want to use is not. How many different parts do you really use? I use standard parts from the library since they are probably, let’s say, usable since hundreds of guys use them and so they should be ok (although, I have made some standard parts from scratch, too) and modify the appearance as I need. The rest I create myself. In most cases, this is not much more work than look them up in the library and verify their correctness and I can keep ‘my style’ in the look-and-feel of the boards. Especially, I see no sense in keeping the anchor at pin 1. For many parts, there are more important points to be the center point. Simply try to rotate a resistor and you know what I mean.
That’s good you choose to teach Open Source tools for your students. If they will need, they could switch to paid software down the road, but they also can benefit from the Open Source world. It’s harder the other way round, and the coroporations know that by subsiding educational licenses to make them future customers.
I agree that you have to trust your assets (symbols, footprints, 3D models) 100%. What I’ve also found was there is a lot of different preferences on how symbols/footprints look. The preferences might be institutional or personal.
Now as for KiCad supplied (official) library it made significant leap in quality from V4 to V5. The KLC standard the library is trying to be consistent with, is the most detailed standard for EDA assets I’ve seen. You might like it or not and I understand this. But is it quite defined and well enforced.
Now if you don+t like parts of the standard (e.g. I don’t like that value field is visible on the footprint fabrication layer) there is an option (not always) to write a script which modifies all the assets in the library to your liking.
And having a library under git, even with personal modifications, this still leaves you with an option to have your personal library derived from official KiCad library. So you can merge any new additions the community provides. It is quite powerful workflow. But you have to be familiar with git and scripting.
I think it depends on what version of Professional CAD you are using. I was working with Protel 3 and I decided to move to KiCad at the beginning of 2017.
The term “professional” gets used with so many interpretations depending on who you ask and what argument they are trying to win, that the term becomes essentially meaningless.
The only useful definition is the dictionary one : “of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession”.
To my mind professional just means you get paid to do it. The term implies nothing about quality or suitability for purpose. So a “Professional piece of software” is a complete misnomer. If you can get paid for using any tool, it’s the correct tool for you.
I don’t agree. I have seen people turn up with what might be considered inappropriate tools and done an amazing job. I have also seen people turn up the the latest greatest, most expensive, shiniest tools and done a shocking job.
My point was more that you can’t judge an outcome just by labelling something (or someone) as Professional. It has a simple meaning, the profession you have chosen to follow (and get paid for), how can it possibly imply a guaranteed quality.
And here in lies the misconception.
There is the colloquial view of what “professional” means and there is reality.
Professional vs Amature really is just being paid to do it vs doing it as a hobby while people interpret it as something being done you would pay for as if that means it holds a higher level of skill,quality, value.
Sames goes for the viewpoint “act professionally” in that it implies a certain behaviour, yet some of the most vitriolic meetings have been when I was getting paid.
Likewise “dress professionally” (suit etc vs tracksuit) because that somehow is a sign that what is being paid for is valued… some of the most dapper dressed “professionals” have left the worst wake …
People get paid to get a job done and depending on the prerequisite anything that can achieve that is viable. Some cost money, some cost time, some leave behind artifacts that cannot be re-used…
Who would you rather have working for you, someone that gets on and does the job well, on time and aligns with your needs or someone that won’t start because they expect certain things
It seems that the word professional came in focus here. So I suggest to label KiCad as open source and Altium Mentor etc. as paid software as my initial post suggested. Professional software is a bad label. As a matter of fact when you do some searches about open source alternatives, Altium articles come up where they compare “professional” software vs open source.
My take on this is a practical one. If you can save money by buying a software, go ahead.
As I mentioned earlier Altium is a powerful peace of software but also hard to maintain your skill if you don’t use it everyday. I label myself as product designer and the actual time I spend at PCB CAD software is limited. I always have long starting time with Altium and a new project.
I am curious how many of you use KiCad in you profession or how many of you use it as hobby. And again I am very impressed of my new discovery KiCad.
From a KiCad developer’s point of view: our primary audience is people who use KiCad professionally in one way or another. We also know that KiCad also has a large hobbyist user base, and try to keep KiCad easy to use so that it is a good tool for those just getting in to the world of PCB design (whether they are hobbyists, students, or professionals who don’t have existing experience with PCB design).
Some makers of commercial EDA software try to equate open-source with hobby-grade, and commercial with professional (in order to encourage people to buy their software instead of considering open-source software). In our opinion, these are two different axes and have little to do with each other. One can certainly consider gaps in specific feature areas to be reasons to consider one piece of software over another, but I think those gaps are mostly independent of whether the software is open-source or commercial.
Some makers of commercial software tried really hard to equate open-source software with things like “theft”, “illegal practices” and other ridiculous smut campaigns…
The other argument I hear, which unfortunately carries more weight… is support - “if something goes wrong, who do we go to, who do we sue…”
Coincidently every single time I have had an issue with a “professional” piece of software it was because their binary format got corrupted. Sure the paid support was used to contact them to “help” but I struggle to remember an instance where the solution wasn’t “how old is your backups”
In my experience, most commercial software companies do not offer paying customers custom builds to fix specific issues, or guarantees that certain features will make it into the next version. Both of those services are now available to customers of KiCad Services!
If I skip the bus label the connection to bus {QDA QDB etc} is working as i should. QDA QDB etc connects over the sheets. But I want multiple buses with the same format like LEFT.QDA, LEFT.QDB, RIGHT.QDA, RIGHT.QDB, SPIA.MISO, SPIA.MOSI, SPIB.MISO, SPIB.MOSI. If I put a label LEFT, RIGHT on the bus line in Altium I got exactly that. But if I label the bus lines in KiCad I get an error. Should this work? Anyone who knows the syntax? I have tried multiple syntaxes more than the one I enclosed.
Your label is just LEFT on the bus, but you should be using LEFT{QDA QDB QDC QDE QDF}. You can also use bus aliases (tools -> bus definitions) to make a shortcut so you don’t have to type out all the members every time.
