Paul  wrote:
> 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.

The thing I've been quite impressed by is the Kicad community.  For instance
I can google for a part, and it's quite often on someone's github.
That makes it much quicker to do board designs.

Caveats are that I don't have enough experience to make a statistical
sample, and some of these parts might not be production ready.  However it's
quicker for me to throw a board together in a day, send it for fab, go do
something else for a week, then fix up the bugs on the real board and fab
the production batch.  The alternative is to do lots of checking before it
goes out first time - but despite that there will invariably be something
else I overlooked.

For the kind of hobbyist fab where you only want one, ever, some more
checking might be useful.  And use Design For Bodging (DfB), a longstanding
hobbyist methodology.

Theo

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