Really Impressed with KiCAD Upgrades since 2012

[posplayr]

I’m just joining this forum as I am in the middle of a board design. I began using KiCAD on a different board design back in late 2012 and finished a Rev C of that board a year later in 2013.
I’m an EE, but in days gone by, as a System Engineer of my own company I would hire guys to do circuit work and especially the PCB layout.

Back in 2012, I thought I would give KiCAD a whirl to see if i could actually create a board for a small limited production product. During that time I struggled to learn the program as I had had very little experience with actually using a schematic capture program. The documentation was sparse and spread out in various help/tutorial on the web. This spoon feeding without the hard documentation makes it really hard to learn. It took a while, but I got through it. I just chocked it up to a learning curve that included limited production of PCBAs.

Fast forward, and now I have another project to build another board. Along with having forgotten what I did back in 2013, I have also downloaded a 4.0.1 stable version of KiCAD and after going through BOM hell the last few days, I downloaded the very latest Version 4.0.2 stable release. I was hoping to finalize my footprint association today actually but got hung up with the footprint library. Lost footprints I had created and can not find them.

I came close to posting a question, but realized I was even having a hard time explaining what was going on and I decided to dig deeper into the various writeups. I had noticed that now there were some actual manuals instead of a 20 page quick start that I used 3 years ago.

https://kicad.org/help/documentation/

Any how with all the trepidation fueled by the urgency to get this board out for fab coupled with the fear of what lurks in the new software version, I am shocked and surprised to find such a tremendous improvement in the KiCAD quality/progress in the latest revisions. Many of the posts you see are belaboring the difficulties of setting up libraries or the BOMs but now that I have been reading the newly published manuals (some literally just out today). The elegance and sophistication of the product are shining through. If you take the time to read how the Library tables are designed to work it is clear that this is going to be a groundbreaking program using cloud based library support in an open source project. Even more remarkable is the CERN support that is now in place and it is clear that KiCAD is moving up and quickly.

If I can complain a little and say that I wished all of this documentation had come out two weeks ago when I first started, it would have saved me some grief but for now I can only see a solid product and clear sailing from here out.

I want to thank the KiCAD developer and give a big thumbs up for everybody that is contributing to this open source project. It is really starting to shine.

Jim

[dchisholm]

Welcome to the growing fellowship of Kicad users. You and I share several common elements in our personal histories with KiCAD.

Yeah, the developers have done a fantastic job of producing this program. It has all the essential features I’ve used from commercial EDA systems costing several thousands of dollars per copy, plus many capabilities I’ll probably never have a need to explore. With KiCAD it’s possible to produce results that meet the requirements of any Configuration Management system I’m familiar with.

Documentation is out there, and it IS improving, but it has a ways to go. These days I create rather simple boards every couple of months, though in prior incarnations I was doing more challenging boards once or twice a year. Even with the commercial EDA tools I used then it was always a challenge to remember how to do various tasks, and the 500-page User’s Manual was always open. (Either a paper copy on my lap, or an electronic version on a spare computer.) KiCAD has not yet reached the point where it has that kind of user support. In fact, once you move beyond the most basic questions I have found this Forum to be generally more helpful than the official documentation. It takes a little effort and creativity to search efficiently but the old topics contain a lot of answers to new questions.

As for libraries and related topics . . . that seems to be a curse common to all EDA systems. There are signs of improvement to KiCAD’s approach but I’m not expecting miracles.

Dale

[Beuf]

One of the best features (besides the enormous speed of development) I think is the fact that all files are text files. This makes it so easy to understand ‘strange things’ in a design/library part and more importantly use standard version control systems in an effective way.

And I agee with Dale, library problems are common to all EDA systems I have ever used (even when it was being used in by a team of full-time PCB designers in a world-wide operating electronics company things go wrong with libraries…