Comment by daemonologist
Comment by daemonologist 2 days ago
You mean like PCBs? KiCad is pretty popular.
Comment by daemonologist 2 days ago
You mean like PCBs? KiCad is pretty popular.
KiCAD has pretty awful UX though
It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good these days. By EE standards it's positively awesome. Single platform vendor toolchain hell is why people leave commercial software and move to KiCad, which runs everywhere, is open source, and has a plugin architecture plus mostly every feature you could ever need except high end simulation (which just needs time).
EasyEDA is basically a single-supply-chain web-SaaS alternative to open source multi-platform KiCad. Not a smart thing to invest time in. Furthermore, its design library is of worse than dubious quality. The vast majority of shared designs are probably non-functional to dangerous.
Creating PCBs is surprisingly straightforward and there are a ton of good resources available.
It’s probably one of the few area of YouTube that is actually still useful. Probably a high enough barrier to entry to stop most slop.
KiCAD has pretty awful UX though. I've tried all of the FOSS PCB design apps except LibrePCB (on my to-do list) and Horizon EDA is definitely the one I'd recommend (even though it also has a fair amount of UX oddities it's much better than KiCAD).
DesignSpark PCB is also decent - only minor UX mistakes like warping the mouse when you zoom.