Comment by contingencies 2 days ago
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.
Ok, but it is easy to drag and drop components from lcsc. Sounds like an enormous time saver. But you're probably right about the lock-in.
Anyway, I'm waiting for AI that is smart enough to read a datasheet and convert it to a KiCad symbol and footprint. Should be around the corner.
Common components all have symbols in the KiCad standard libraries.
For others, just use https://github.com/Steffen-W/Import-LIB-KiCad-Plugin or similar to import from an online source. Also grabs 3D models.
Worst case, you can draw custom footprints pretty easily.
AI is good but it tends to fall down when it comes to multiple conflicting design constraints, supply chain conditions, thermal considerations, mechanical considerations, and other concerns which are not same-domain as an electronic connectivity topology problem. Let's not get started on environmental factors, firmware hacks, board house physics, or assembly labor optimization.
Has anyone tried EasyEDA? I hear people raving about it, but I don't know if it's because of the tight integration with LCSC, the availability of symbols and footprints, or if it's really that good.