[sdiy] KiCad, Was Proteus software

[Eric Brombaugh]

On Feb 20, 2011, at 8:19 AM, Karl Ekdahl wrote:

> I run KiCad and have so far designed all of my commercial projects in it, i think it's quiet excellent.
> 
> I have been curious about gEda though, it seems to me that consensus is that gEda is a step above KiCad - i'm wondering if this is generally true and thus whether it's worth me spending time to learn another software. If there are benefits - are they benefits that will help the typical small-scale designer? Not making any 8 layer boards here...

I've been using gEDA/PCB for personal project for the last few years. Generally I'm very happy with it. I've just started using KiCad, mainly to stretch my brain and get a bit more perspective on the design process. Here are a few things I've noticed:

* KiCad's schematic capture 'eeschema' is a bit nicer than the one in gEDA 'gschem'. The main difference I've found is that the out-of-box GUI commands  in eeschema follow the normal conventions for things like cut/paste more closely than does gschem. I understand that gschem's UI can be customized, but no one has done this for the main distributions, so you have to learn to save by typing F+S instead of ^S. It's a little thing, but it clashes. There are few downsides to eeschema, but overall I find it a bit more polished.

* gEDA is more oriented towards the traditional *nix way of doing things, meaning that you spend more time on the command line running little tools to convert netlists, generate BOMs, etc. KiCad also consists of a set of separate apps, but it has a top-level project manager app that streamlines the process of moving data between the lower-level apps and keeps track of global settings for you without having to remember a variety of cryptic command line options. I understand that many long-time gEDA users tend to encapsulate these processes in makefiles, but again, these makefiles aren't part of the standard distribution so new users have to figure this out for themselves. More simply, KiCad is better for GUI folks, while gEDA/PCB is better for command-line folks. I straddle that line generally so I don't really have a preference in this area.

* KiCad seems buggier. I've found numerous little issues, crashes, etc in the various tools - things like postscript plotting filling symbols with the outline color instead of the designated fill color, rendering the interior text unreadable, or the netlist converter not remembering the global library path settings. gEDA seems a bit more mature in this area.

* Both tools can work cross-platform. gEDA/PCB works fine on my Macbook via Fink, although I use it mostly under Linux. I've not tried to use gEDA/PCB on WinXX but I'm given to understand there's an active porting effort. KiCad works well on both Linux and WinXX, and although there is a Mac OS X snapshot available it seems to be rather glitchy.

* Both tools have reasonable libraries of symbols & footprints available online. You'll never find everything you need with any toolsuite (maybe Altium, but you'll pay for it), so learning to make your own early on is crucial. Making symbols feels a bit less fiddly in KiCad. As one might expect, gEDA/PCB footprints are best made in a text editor, while KiCad's GUI editor is a bit smoother.

Overall I like both. I wouldn't say one is hands-down better than the other, but folks with strong feelings on the GUI vs cmdline axis might feel different.

Eric