Homebrew PCBs

"Phil Mattison" <mattison20@...> writes:
> I just spent an hour looking at KiCad. Looks pretty impressive,
> though I got the impression that the footprint library may be a bit
> light.

There are a ton of symbols in gEDA's library, and people end up making
their own anyway.  Why?  Because there are so many OTHER parts we
haven't gotten around to.  Even with a big commercial system, there's
going to be parts you'll need to enter yourself, so it's one of the
things you should learn about any cad program.

What we did for gEDA was to set up a place where people could share
their libraries: www.gedasymbols.org.  We're all still making our own
footprints, but at least we're not duplicating our efforts as much.
Even so, you end up making custom footprints for parts that aren't
common.

> Could be a big time sink if too many components require custom
> footprints.

Yeah, we've put a lot of effort into streamlining that for gEDA, as
it's a common complaint.  At least most of the parts use standard
footprints these days, but for symbols we have a number of "helper"
scripts that generate symbols from short textual descriptions, such as
my djboxsym, or jgboxsym or tragesym.  I added two online web-form
footprint generators for two-pad SMTs and dual inline SMTs.

Anyway, IMHO learning how to make symbols and footprints should be
part of the evaluation of any cad package, since you end up doing it
anyway.