[sdiy] What's the best freeware schematic capture and PCB layout software

[Pete Hartman]

On Mon, May 13, 2024 at 3:58 PM Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net> wrote:

> While this sounds very contrary to what Matthew is saying, I do have some
> sympathy for his view. I've also had circuits where I've drawn two
> different versions of the same thing, because (for example) I had a guitar
> stompbox circuit and I needed a diagram that showed the whole circuit
> including the external jack inputs and the effect in/out footswitch. You
> can do that on a schematic and show the switches and everything, but if
> you're designed a schematic to be turned into a PCB, those connections are
> just off-board links that don't tell you much ("connection1", "connection2"
> etc). So it *is* pretty easy to finish up with one version for "display"
> and one version for "manufacture", even with something as simple as a
> guitar pedal. Of course, you *can* work around this by adding non-netlisted
> graphics to the schematic that fill in the missing off-board components,
> but that *is* a fudge, and it is error-prone since there's no way to check
> those connections (and they're so often !
>  the ones people get wrong!).
>

In kicad I've often done this sort of thing (also e.g. 2 PCBs that plug
together) with separate sheets and headers on each side that are meant to
connect to each other.
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