Has anyone tried KiCad before?

[Henk Boonsma]

http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/

It's an open-source CAE program which sort of looks like Eagle (or at least
reminds me of it). I saw it discussed on a website and had a look at it and
it looks nice. The library is a bit terse, though.

On the plus-side: it has both an autoplacer and an autorouter. It seems to
have been a research project from a French university but it looks pretty
nice and since it was written using wxWidgets, versions for Linux and Mac OS
X may also appear.

Has anyone used this package and produced boards with it (aside from the
author)? I'm interested in the results.

 

[Stuart Brorson]

Henk Boonsma <hboonsma@teranet.news> wrote:
: http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/

[ . . . . . snip . . . . . . .]

: Has anyone used this package and produced boards with it (aside from the
: author)? I'm interested in the results.

Funny that you should ask. At a recent Free Dog meeting (Free EDA
Users Group = FreeEDAUG) we played around with it, and in particular
compared it to the gEDA/PCB Suite with which we are more familiar.
Here is a link to our review of KiCad (amongst other topics) posted on
the geda-user mailing list:

http://archives.seul.org/geda/user/Aug-2005/msg00023.html

Make of it what you will. None of us have taken a board through
layout using the package, so we can't offer the level of insight which
you may want.

Stuart