In article ,
theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk says...
>
> The Natural Philosopher  wrote:
> > On 12/07/17 10:32, Theo Markettos wrote:
> > > The Natural Philosopher  wrote:
> > >> My eagle aint cloudified. Downloaded it 6 months ago
> > >
> > > I should clarify: not 'cloudified' in the sense of Google Docs, but in
the
> > > sense of Adobe Creative Cloud.
> > >
> > > In other words, it's a normal desktop app but you have to create an
account
> > > and login to make it work, and you pay a monthly subscription.
> >
> > No. you dont. Its free to hobbyists.
>
> As I said, there's a free tier but with limitation.
> In particular board capabilities, and no commercial use.
> AIUI you still need an account and let it phone home occasionally to use the
free
> tier.

For free version I looked at that was the case when I looked about 6
months ago.

> > In Eagle's
> > > case this mostly affects the pay-tiers (there's a free tier, but it's
quite
> > > restricted: 2 layers, 80cm2 of board).
> >
> > Think its more than 2 layers.
>
> They reduced it as part of the Autodesk purchase.
> It's "2 schematic sheets, 2 signal layers, and 80 cm2 board area."
> https://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/free-download
> - it used to be 160x100mm, ie 160cm2.
>
> The trouble with a limitation like that is that many designs can be
> physically small, but as the complexity rises (tiny SMD parts, high-speed
> etc) you need more layers.  Which aren't that expensive to manufacture these
> days.  Or you can stay 2-layer, but the boards are larger because of routing
> limitations.

As a commercial user of Eagle for 17 years I have made many things
available for other Eagle users and made many PCBs of many sizes and
layers

Some large examples
 350 x 220 - 2 layer
 330 x 310 - 6 layer

For many different environments and markets

The changing license setup, change to annual subscription, still got the
useless built in library parts, let alone some of the annoying bugs, I
am now in long process of changing to KiCAD (which is multi-platform).

Long process as lots of information has to be transferred (as with
change to any other package would be). Some of my designs have to be
supported for 20 years so I have to keep sysytems with old versions of
Eagle for a while yet.

> TL;DR: Kicad has come a long way recently.  What extra does Eagle give
> me that makes it worth my while jumping through these hoops?

Even had long phone conversation with old Eagle staff now part of
Autodesk and explained why I would not be continuing with Eagle and
changing.

The start of the rot was when it was originally bought by Farnell
then Autodesk was final nail in coffin.

For those interested in KiCad a couple of YouTube videos from an
electronics blogger who does commercial designs and his impressions
back in 2012

Installation and schematic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRXEc7pB0o0

Making POB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRXEc7pB0o0

His overall view in 2012 was it was good then

Kicad have their own tutorials pages as well
kicad-pcb.org/help/tutorials/


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