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Migrating off Eagle to open source PCB tools

morgaine

A very interesting blog post by Olimex on "Why is important Open Source Hardware Community to use Open Source CAD tools" was posted a few days ago.  Their rationale and migration plan is great news for open source fans of course, and also great news for all hardware enthusiasts who work on complex boards that exceed the limits of the proprietary freebies.  The many very highly positive blog comments reflect that.

 

I'm really looking forward to their kiCAD migration tests.  There will be some pain involved, as they do acknowledge, but the end goal is worth it.

 

Morgaine.

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  • This is very good news.  FLOSS often suffers from a chicken/egg problem where users won't use FLOSS because it's not as good as FiaB and developers aren't motivated to perfect FLOSS because there aren't enough users to provide the helpful feedback and especially reproducible bug reports so that FLOSS can achieve high quality.  But once you get over the threshold it's gangbusters.  I'm delighted to see eCAD reaching the threshold.

     

    Today PCBs, tomorrow FPGAs! :-)

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  • This is very good news.  FLOSS often suffers from a chicken/egg problem where users won't use FLOSS because it's not as good as FiaB and developers aren't motivated to perfect FLOSS because there aren't enough users to provide the helpful feedback and especially reproducible bug reports so that FLOSS can achieve high quality.  But once you get over the threshold it's gangbusters.  I'm delighted to see eCAD reaching the threshold.

     

    Today PCBs, tomorrow FPGAs! :-)

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  • in reply to johnbeetem

    John Beetem wrote:

     

    Today PCBs, tomorrow FPGAs! :-)

    Haha, indeed! image

     

    I wonder if it's worth pointing out the conceptual similarities between component libraries for PCB tools and Verilog/VHDL cores in the FPGA world.  Although PCB components are a much cleaner "black box" from the perspective of someone wishing to combine them, nevertheless there is an element of "select component from list" to HDL cores as well, and in principle open source fans could be adding to FPGA core repositories as easily as to PCB components libraries.

     

    There's a rather large gap between principle and practice of course, but I think perhaps it might be closing, slowly.

     

    Morgaine.

     

     

    Addendum:  Top level of tree of FPGA cores and core projects at OpenCores.