Homebrew PCBs

You guys made me curious. I downloaded and tried Diptrace out (went 
through the tutorial etc.). I do not agree that it is soooo user 
friendly compared to Eagle (as strange as this may sounds). Don't get 
this wrong. It's truly ok for the money but for instance, I particularly 
find it clumsey to assign values to parts and make this visible in the 
schematic entry program. You really have to go through too many mouse 
clicks for such a frequent operation. I liked some other features though 
(i.e. some more intelligence moving around parts that are already have 
connections etc.). What I also miss (ok, might be that I just don't know 
how to do it) is the ability to enter purchase department oriented 
information for parts. I'm not totally fluent in english, so please bear 
with me when I now try to explain what I mean with more words than 
otherwise needed. Anyways, from personal experience I just know that 
having the information ready to actually order parts for a production 
run of a design is a painfull, time consuming process. I expect from a 
modern CAD package some support here. Like being able to define 
(multiple) suppliers for a part, entering price per quantity 
information, datasheet URLs etc. etc. and having a process thereafter 
that allows to make intelligent orders. Eagle has solved this with a ULP 
(but IMHO that should be part of the base product but that's a 
discussion we had already in the past).

What I also miss is a similar feature like the ULPs in Eagle. Well, one 
should be able to "add" individual functionality to a package as it's 
possible with Eagle. Diptrace does have the ASCII export feature which 
could be used to modify the database and reimport, but that seems a 
little complicated let alone the fact that the data format does not seem 
to be documented (as oposed to Eagle). Doing layout work also is not as 
easy as it is in Eagle.

However, I DO like the fact though that this seems to be a competition 
for Eagle and I would recommend the package to someone looking for a 
good package on a budget. Besides it seems to be a relatively new 
product, so we may will see progress in the future.

Just my 2\ufffd of course.

Markus

Dave schrieb:
>
>
>
> phildimond wrote:
> > Dave - can I give you the same pointer someone else on this gave to
> > me? I've been down the KiCAD / AutoTrax / Eagle / etc path. Have a
> > look at DIPTrace: http://www.diptrace.com <http://www.diptrace.com> 
> - has a 250 pin freeware
> > limit, but the pricing is quote reasonable for larger versions.
> >
> > Phil
> >
> Wow! I just installed this and talk about user friendly. I had it
> figured out in 10 minutes how to work it. Very nice indeed. Of course I
> will need to design my circuit now and see how many items are available
> in the libraries and if any are missing how to make them etc...Thanks
> again for the info. :)
> Dave
>
>