Re: Eagle and Kicad

Hi!,


On 2016-01-08 14:50, Marko Mäkelä wrote:
> ...
> I wonder if KiCAD/gEDA can be tweaked to support two-way annotation
> (rename a signal in the circuit board, and get it renamed in the
> schematics), or even incremental design (modify the schematic without
> having to restart your circuit board design from the scratch). Maybe
> there are some scripts for doing this; AFAIU the format is text-based
> and thus theoretically easy to handle by sed, awk, perl, and of course
> version control systems.

That AFAIK doesn't work out of the box. (It's an one-way process, ie. 
schematics --> netlist + annotations --> PCB editor.)

> Another concern that I had was how to submit the board designs to
> manufacturing. Many shops take Eagle files.

As far as I can see the standard format for shops is usually gerber + 
drill files (a large percentage also accepting files in the more popular 
proprietary CAD programs formats). I could at least successfully 
generate gerber + drill output from KiCAD and have a PCB shop 
manufacture the board a couple of years ago.

> Right, someone please pave the road for us all! :)

On a related note, speaking as a regular CirCAD user back in the '90s, 
KiCAD slightly feels like some of its design principles were borrowed 
from CirCAD. I wouldn't call myself an expert in KiCAD (only ever 
designed simple through-hole boards in it and also haven't touched it 
for the last, say, two years), but for me the move has been relatively 
easy. I needed to re-create stuff of course (most definitely, converting 
libraries from an ancient system was out of question), but the stuff's 
"way of thinking" has been familiar right from the start.


Best regards,


Levente


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