Revision as of 10:48, 15 April 2013

KiCAD is a FLOSS software to create schematics and PCB layouts (EDA) and a candidate for being used to create all future Axiom/Alpha electronic designs.

Official KiCAD website: http://www.kicad-pcb.org/display/KICAD/KiCad+EDA+Software+Suite

We are currently evaluating if it can really meet the high demands of this complex kind of designs we plan to do.

1 Guides/Tutorials

The perfect way to get to know the basics of the software are these 2 youtube videos (if you can live with the the electronic steven hawking voice):

• Tutorial part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkQ0nVX1q1k

• Tutorial part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HNMihqa844

• Creating new components for KiCAD: http://store.curiousinventor.com/guides/kicad/new_components/

More Tutorials on:

• http://dangerousprototypes.com/tag/kicad/
• http://teholabs.com/knowledge/kicad.html

1.1 What other people are thinking

The folks over at http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/09/14/dangerous-prototypes-kicad-eda-experience/ listed their observations:

• no screen panning with middle mouse button <- actually you can pan with the middle mouse button but rather than a kind of drag/drop shifting of the view you center the view where you click.

• Minor adjustments to a schematic after starting the board are a nightmare. You have to create a new netlist, loading it into the PCB editor, and update the PCB connections. This gets very tedious with our team-based iterative design process.

• Placing vias on polygons/planes is too complicated, such as vias to join ground planes. You have to trace each via to an already existing trace or pad and connect to it.

• Another thing to note is that KiCad doesn’t have a command console. Placing components at exact coordinates is rather complicated, and requires frequent grid alterations.

• When I update a netlist which has different trace rules and some of those are assigned to numerical nets. Because the PCB tool doesn’t know these are different nets now it doesn’t keep the categories straight. You can of course give your own labels to all the wires and it would keep it straight but that’s a bit tedious.

2 Alternatives

• Free version of Eagle for non commercial use only and with size restrictions.

• gEDA is really a big electrical design tool suite that happens to do PCBs as such it isn’t all that integrated, this makes it harder to use than KiCAD. (quoting http://teholabs.com/knowledge/kicad.html)