Migrating off Eagle to open source PCB tools

So here's my experience:  A couple of years ago I really needed an EDA package; I looked at gEDA, KiCad, etc and what I found was that while the commercial packages had fairly complete component libraries, that the FOSS packages seemed not to.

In my experience, if there's something going to go wrong in a design, it's the mechanical details; I've seldom been able to create a component without a mistake, so having the parts libraries was the selling point for the commercial packages.

I ended up using Eagle based on their pricing and availability of libraries.  Even then, I still had to create a component or two.

It seems to me that what the FOSS community needs is the libraries; whichever software has that will be adopted.

So here's my experience:  A couple of years ago I really needed an EDA package; I looked at gEDA, KiCad, etc and what I found was that while the commercial packages had fairly complete component libraries, that the FOSS packages seemed not to.

In my experience, if there's something going to go wrong in a design, it's the mechanical details; I've seldom been able to create a component without a mistake, so having the parts libraries was the selling point for the commercial packages.

I ended up using Eagle based on their pricing and availability of libraries.  Even then, I still had to create a component or two.

It seems to me that what the FOSS community needs is the libraries; whichever software has that will be adopted.

I'd have to agree. I end up creating most of the schematic symbols and footprints I use in gEDA myself. The standard stuff (resistors, caps, generic footprints like SOT23, TQFP44 etc) are there, but other things need creating.

gEDA has http://www.gedasymbols.org/ that quite a few people contribute to, but even so the coverage is relatively small.

One advantage to learning how to create your own is that I have specific footprints for things like the Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black that have all of the connectors in the right places, silk screen markings for cutouts around any tall connectors etc.

Bruce Prewit wrote:

 

It seems to me that what the FOSS community needs is the libraries; whichever software has that will be adopted.

Yep.  There's absolutely no arguing with that.

It's very good news though, because in open source, libraries just grow and grow, and only very rarely regress.  At some point, an actively developed system like KiCad is quite likely to catch up with the bulk of "normal" components, and is then perceived as having "everything" most of the time.  From then on, it's all coasting downhill, just needing to keep up with new products.

It's a bit like the situation with device drivers in Linux.  For a long time, peripherals support in Linux was regarded as really sparse or threadbare, and if you bought a random PC there was a very high chance that it would contain one or more components that lacked Linux drivers.  But Linux caught up.  Nowadays nobody laughs at Linux driver support, and the drivers are mostly maintained forever instead of bit-rotting on the next O/S release as happens in Windows.

I expect that good things lie ahead for open source EDA tools, at least at the PCB level.

For FPGAs, well, John has had a few harsh things to say on that subject in the past.

Morgaine.