Would You Be Interested in Roadtesting KiCad EDA?

I used Kicad EDA for so long now and have made some designs using it.

My idea is to make a schematic design in EAGLE and then switch to Kicad for PCB layout. The reason is that EAGLE offers good schematic design features compared to Kicad while Kicad has good features in PCB layout design. Also, it is open source.

It would be really interesting to do a roadtest and one which covers different aspects such as Schematic design, PCB layout, Simulation of the circuit with Spice, Antena impedance calculation etc. That way we can Roadtest Kicad in a more effective manner. And also check how the theoretical values match practical performance.

The EAGLE import into KiCad is really excellent. However, it might be difficult to do this as a regular workflow, since the import is really just for working with legacy projects.

Maybe it's possible to adjust the defaults in KiCad and EAGLE to match more closely so that it could be a regular workflow, but I think that will be tricky.

In any case, KiCad is really good for EAGLE enthusiasts who want to maintain legacy projects. 

I've wanted to make some changes to an old EAGLE project, and instead of just editing the project in EAGLE, I imported it all into KiCad.

The left side is EAGLE, the right side is the KiCad import. Looks really good (although I will need to make a few minor tweaks for cosmetic purposes):

The fonts are different to the ones that KiCad uses by default, so that will be a bit annoying when adding new KiCad parts which use more normal fonts. Anyway it's a cosmetic thing (I was able to resolve it by doing search-and-replace of the font size in the .kicad_sch file, using a text editor).

Also the PCB gets imported too, and it looks spot-on. During the import, the Auto-Match Layers button should be clicked. It won't auto-match EAGLE tRestrict and bRestrict layers which is a bit odd, but it's easy to resolve; simply set  the tRestrict layer to map to KiCad layer User.1 and set bRestrict to User.2. This seems to work,although I have no idea why. It was simply trial-and-error and it works for me.

I learned a few things while importing that EAGLE project. I have tried it with another project, to check if it was project-specific or not. There are a few things worth discussing, I've placed it in a separate blog post:

 Working with KiCad 7: Importing EAGLE files  

I think KiCad will become even more famous amongst makers learning EAGLE is going to be discontinued (I read that Autodesk is going to discontinue EAGLE). 

I think KiCad will become even more famous amongst makers learning EAGLE is going to be discontinued (I read that Autodesk is going to discontinue EAGLE).