Homebrew PCBs

DJ Delorie wrote:
>  
> 
> I looked at the press release a little, and it does't seem any more
> "free" than anything else we already have, except that you have to join
> their community to unlock the software. Even Eagle doesn't make you
> join their community for their "free" version, and gEDA and Kicad have
> been even more free (and sometimes more professional) than the give-away
> proprietary stuff.

IME where the scales tip for me with gEDA/PCB is getting an answer
to a question usually in minutes and a patch to a suspect
problem in an hour.  And being able to use even 30+ year old
'awk' technology to tweak footprints, etc.. on well documented
text file object representations -- for the odd occasion when
the GUI doesn't meet the need.  That all pretty much seals the
deal for me.

Yea, if I'm going to routinely lay out a 20-ish layer boards
requiring autorouting of transmission characteristic controlled
lines well maybe I still need to wander over to the dark side. 
But I haven't yet had to resort to black-box software.

> It looks like EDA software is becoming such a commodity item that
> every's starting to use theirs as a loss leader to get people hooked
> into other aspects of their business - pcb fab, design forums, extended
> features, advertising. I'm reserving judgement on whether or not this
> is a good thing - competition is good, but fragmentation can be worse.

At one point years ago I was enticed by pcb123's proposition.
I even tried to get it to work under wine (officially unsupported)
without usable results.  And if you want gerbers out of their
proprietary format that'll be $50 on top of your board order.
And of course you still haven't broken free from being tied to
a proprietary, vendor specific tool.

That's one data point and better propositions exist today if
you really want semi-free tools.  But considering the total
usage burden I personally haven't found a more compelling solution
elsewhere.

Just my experience, YMMV.

-john

-- 
john.cooper@...