• KiCad looks really good!

      Unfortunately my experience with it is limited and it didn’t quite work out. I can’t afford Altium, but I had to look at some schematics for a project I was working on. I had to go through some roundabout way to import the Altium files into KiCad, and the result was rather poor. I ended up just working off of the PDF export. I’m willing to bet Altium makes subtle changes to their file format all the time, making it difficult for other tools to interoperate.

      I’ve heard a lot of open hardware projects use KiCad though, so it must be good!

  • Not sure what this has to do with privacy, but interesting!

    I don’t do a lot of circuit design, but it seems that the open source schematic software still isn’t quite up to par with Altium. Anyone have any real experience comparing the open source alternatives?

    • @blank_sl8@lemmy.ml
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      43 years ago

      KiCAD is a very powerful open source schematic capture and pcb design tool, which has the backing of major groups including DigiKey and CERN.

    • @j0ta@lemmy.mlOP
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      13 years ago

      Everything related to USA is privacy conserning and don’t p.m with your toughts of what or should i do

      • Sorry, I meant no offense. I was just curious. Altium is used mostly by a particular group of people (hardware designers) and it’s extremely expensive so I was wondering if there was some other implication I missed.

        But yes, as far as I know, Altium is the dominant player by far, and that’s unfortunate. What’s worse is they seem to be pushing their Web based tool so they’re getting into all that SaaS BS.