SparkFun Forums

[global-pcbpartner]

I'm a spammer so ignore all of my posts.

[leon_heller]

Pulsonix.

Leon

[Philba]

gasp! Leon said the P word!

Sorry, I couldn't resist...

There is no best as you can't make that determination in a vacuum.

I use Eagle, as do many others. When it comes to cost effectiveness, you can't beat it. However, your choice of design sw is driven by many factors and what may be perfect for Leon or I may not be for you. It's all about context.

[Rochey]

Eagle... version 5's user interface has improved significantly too.

[no first name supplied]

No wonder you have used it, since you operate it.

[macegr]

No wonder you have used it, since you operate it.

Now now...you'd be surprised at how many people run a business and have never sampled their own product.

[winston]

When it comes to cost effectiveness, you can't beat it.

I think you can -- gEDA PCB is a lot more cost effective, especially if you're making >2 layer boards or larger boards!

The gEDA suite might not be for everyone, but it is software libre (Free in all senses of the word) and has documented file formats, which makes it easy to write scripts in whatever language you choose if you have some action that needs to be scripted. It also has a very active development community.

[Philba]

Not to quibble, but does gEDA pay you to use it? hard to get lower than 0.

I get what you are trying to say but think it's no where nearly as black and white. Not so minor details like what it runs on, schematics and so on. I'm not saying it isn't a good solution (heck, I don't know) but there are many factors involved.

I still think that for an average hobbyist, you can't beat Eagle for cost effectiveness.

[leon_heller]

I used EasyPC for about 25 years:

http://www.numberone.com

It's about the same price as Eagle and is much easier to use.

Leon

[NleahciM]

Eagle sucks.

I haven't used Pulsonix - but it has a pretty small user base so I don't see it as attractive.

My current favorite is Altium Designer.

[gussy]

I use Eagle and don't have any major problems with it, I quite like it.

Saying that, I have never used anything else so don't really have anything to compare it to.

[Kuroi Kenjin]

Although I've been kind of out of the hardware arena writing a C cross-compiler, I really like FreePCB for it's absolute multi-layer simplicity. It doesn't really have much of a library, but the foot print editor is quick and simple. Also, it's free. Last I heard there were plans for it to integrate with TincyCAD, which is also free. At any rate, someone who's never designed a PCB can sit down with FreePCB and in about 5-10 mins get a reasonable board worked up.

[winston]

Not to quibble, but does gEDA pay you to use it? hard to get lower than 0.

No, but there's free and there's Free. Eagle doesn't come with source, it doesn't come with documented file formats, and the gratis version is extremely restrictive - too restrictive, for instance, for my strictly hobbyist use! Only one of my last dozen or so projects would be possible with the gratis version of Eagle - all of the others (and they are fairly modest) have too many layers, too much board area or too many pins/pads to be possible with the gratis version of Eagle. The pin/pad count really mounts up fast when you're doing computer circuits with a data and address bus!

The gEDA toolchain is about equivalent in functionality to the most expensive Eagle license (costing US $1494 *per seat*) AND you get full source, fully documented and human readable file formats (great for use with source control software), and no worries about DRM locking you out of your own work. Not to mention no limit on board size (well, not a sane one, anyway) and by default, you can route up to 8 signal layers.

It's not entirely perfect, I'm sure the Eagle toolchain is more tightly integrated than the gEDA toolchain, but for the sake of learning one straightforward command line incantation to process the netlists for PCB layout, I think it's well worth it for the US$1494 saving. The autorouter isn't all that hot either, but then again, Eagle's autorouter is more cursed than loved.

To get a better value proposition than gEDA, I feel you probably have to go to the very expensive professional electronics house EDA toolchains (value ain't just about how much something costs).

[Philba]

it depends on what you are measuring to define "free". I'm not arguing about the value but gEDA takes a bit more commitment than just running an install on a windows machine. I'd estimate that 99% of users don't care about open source - they just want to use a package. I'm a huge fan of FOSS but most could care less.

[olivier_p]

I use Altium as well, but maybe only because it is the first one I learned how to use correctly. For a short time I had to use PowerPCB and hated it (probably because I compared it to Altium and did not want to learn how to use it )