I paid Eagle $125 and bought the student version. Boards 160x100 which is a Eurocard size and for that I seem to be able to do all that I need to do. (The free version is is half the size and severely limiting).
Hi James! Thanks! The free version of Eagle has the 4"x3" restriction which renders it almost useless except for trivially small toy boards. At a minimum, I need the Eurocard size for the N8VEM ECB boards but even those are crowded for some designs. However, about half of the N8VEM board are S-100 10"x5.3" ~50 square inch PCBs which even the student edition of Eagle does not support. In other words, to get even minimum functionality out of Eagle EDA, I'd have to upgrade to the full commercial edition and *still* have the risk of getting stranded. I think with active competitors like DipTrace coming along the likelihood of Eagle going under has increased significantly.
Re Kicad vs Eagle, Andrew Lynch often spends a week in the optimiser running Kicad, and with Eagle I do the same board in about 10 minutes. That means I can rip it up and rebuild it many times in an evening. I always use the autorouter as I find it is more productive to do multiple ripups/reroutes than to build the perfect board manually only to find I want to swap two chips around.
Yes, I can get quick PCB autoroutes in a few minutes also with KiCAD and FreeRouting.net for evaluation or even a prototype PCB. What takes days or weeks to finish is a good quality optimized autorouting of the PCB. The autorouter in Eagle is well known to make poor quality routing and many of the hobbyists who use Eagle export their designs to FreeRouting.net to get the good quality. Those take time in either manual routing or long optimization times. The 10 minute Eagle autoroute board is not comparable to a fully optimized FreeRouting.net board or one that has been manually routed. There is a big difference especially with densely packed boards.
I'm a hobbyist, but if I can start early in the evening when I get home I can draw a schematic, do a board layout and create the gerbers and have it emailed to the PCB house by midnight.
But at the end of the day, I'm probably not qualified to comment on Eagle vs Diptrace vs Kicad, because I have only ever used one of those. I guess one really needs a comment from someone who is proficient in a number of packages.
We all have preferences and that is OK to disagree. It is probably pointless to argue "which is better" since it is highly subjective. However, I think hobbyists need to be aware of the long sad history of people using commercial EDA tools that have ended up stranded with orphan software. This is a common problem in industry and I've seen it happen repeatedly over the years. You can partially mitigate the risk by entering escrow agreements with the EDA developers but that costs *huge* amounts and generally out of reach for hobbyists.
Eagle is now owned by Farnell, it isn't likely to "go under" any time soon!
Hi! As Stanislav pointed out though, commercial companies make products to make profit. If Farnell finds Eagle is no longer profitable in light of new competitors such as DipTrace they could easily drop it. Whether Farnell goes out of business or not is irrelevant because it is their support of Eagle that matters. If they decide to not support Eagle its users are just as stranded.
A few years ago Yahoo! was an unstoppable juggernaut. Now they are teetering on extinction. These things happen.
DipTrace has P-CAD ASCII export capability and this format is widely used with the documentation available. So if KiCAD developers will add import capability for it, they will automatically able to export designs from DipTrace (+ P-CAD, Protel, Altium, etc. etc.). Such feature can be made by professional full-time programmer in approx 2 months (including testing). The problem is that such work is not very interesting for volunteer (big amount of coding/testing and no really cool things).
We plan to redesign our own ASCII format a bit in the future and make documentation for it.
DipTrace has P-CAD ASCII export capability and this format is widely used with the documentation available. So if KiCAD developers will add import capability for it, they will automatically able to export designs from DipTrace (+ P-CAD, Protel, Altium, etc. etc.). Such feature can be made by professional full-time programmer in approx 2 months (including testing). The problem is that such work is not very interesting for volunteer (big amount of coding/testing and no really cool things).
We plan to redesign our own ASCII format a bit in the future and make documentation for it.
Regards,
Stanislav Ruev
DipTrace Team
Thanks Stanislav,
I will look into the P-CAD import/export for KiCAD and see what turns up. Good luck with your DipTrace ASCII export format. I think that would be great!
Comments
Hi James! Thanks! The free version of Eagle has the 4"x3" restriction which renders it almost useless except for trivially small toy boards. At a minimum, I need the Eurocard size for the N8VEM ECB boards but even those are crowded for some designs. However, about half of the N8VEM board are S-100 10"x5.3" ~50 square inch PCBs which even the student edition of Eagle does not support. In other words, to get even minimum functionality out of Eagle EDA, I'd have to upgrade to the full commercial edition and *still* have the risk of getting stranded. I think with active competitors like DipTrace coming along the likelihood of Eagle going under has increased significantly.
Yes, I can get quick PCB autoroutes in a few minutes also with KiCAD and FreeRouting.net for evaluation or even a prototype PCB. What takes days or weeks to finish is a good quality optimized autorouting of the PCB. The autorouter in Eagle is well known to make poor quality routing and many of the hobbyists who use Eagle export their designs to FreeRouting.net to get the good quality. Those take time in either manual routing or long optimization times. The 10 minute Eagle autoroute board is not comparable to a fully optimized FreeRouting.net board or one that has been manually routed. There is a big difference especially with densely packed boards.
We all have preferences and that is OK to disagree. It is probably pointless to argue "which is better" since it is highly subjective. However, I think hobbyists need to be aware of the long sad history of people using commercial EDA tools that have ended up stranded with orphan software. This is a common problem in industry and I've seen it happen repeatedly over the years. You can partially mitigate the risk by entering escrow agreements with the EDA developers but that costs *huge* amounts and generally out of reach for hobbyists.
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
Hi! As Stanislav pointed out though, commercial companies make products to make profit. If Farnell finds Eagle is no longer profitable in light of new competitors such as DipTrace they could easily drop it. Whether Farnell goes out of business or not is irrelevant because it is their support of Eagle that matters. If they decide to not support Eagle its users are just as stranded.
A few years ago Yahoo! was an unstoppable juggernaut. Now they are teetering on extinction. These things happen.
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
DipTrace has P-CAD ASCII export capability and this format is widely used with the documentation available. So if KiCAD developers will add import capability for it, they will automatically able to export designs from DipTrace (+ P-CAD, Protel, Altium, etc. etc.). Such feature can be made by professional full-time programmer in approx 2 months (including testing). The problem is that such work is not very interesting for volunteer (big amount of coding/testing and no really cool things).
We plan to redesign our own ASCII format a bit in the future and make documentation for it.
Regards,
Stanislav Ruev
DipTrace Team
Thanks Stanislav,
I will look into the P-CAD import/export for KiCAD and see what turns up. Good luck with your DipTrace ASCII export format. I think that would be great!
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
Eagle vs Diptrace (Click to see)