KICAD, a free electronics design suite
Saturday, May 5th, 2007Over the years I’ve designed quite a few circuit boards, and accompanying schematics, using Protel, or more lately, EagleCAD. The former is exceedingly expensive and bloated. The free version of the latter is more affordable but limited in board size and layer number.
In the last few weeks, I’ve ditched both and moved to a free (GPL licensed) package called KICAD. Developed by French academic Jean-Pierre Charras, originally as an exercise in learning C++, it includes integrated schematic layout, PCB design, and a Gerber viewer. Very quick, stable, and easy to use. And it runs on both Linux and Windows, which has proven very handy indeed. Unlike Eagle, KICAD keeps schematic symbols and PCB footprints separate until you associate them in the netlist manager, which I find to be a far more flexible arrangement. And while the part libraries aren’t as extensive as in Protel or Eagle, the library editor makes creating new parts very straight forward. There are also some utilities available for converting schematic symbols and footprints from Eagle to KICAD format. It’s an outstanding little package! A tutorial for getting started is available here.