Any opinions regarding ORCAD vs any other schematic/PCB suite?

frank freedman

Looking at schematic capture and PCB software again. Any opinions regarding ORCAD, EAGLE and the others? Leave price out of the equation at this point.

Thanks

yeti

—▶ http://hackaday.com/tag/creating-a-pcb-in-everything/

hatallica

A few details might help to inform the conversation - do you have experience with other CAD-type software? how complex are the designs that you anticipate?

Be prepared for the requisite trips down memory lane, as these threads almost always end up with recollections going all the way back to manually creating lithographs. I, personally, rather like DipTrace. I found it to be intuitive, which is critical as there could be many months between times that I need to design a PCB. Others on the forum are strong advocates for KiCad, with which I have no experience. And so on.

PCB Shopper maintains a list of free software, with user reviews - https://pcbshopper.com/cad/

Maybe download a couple of free versions and play around a bit?

Heater.

CADSTAR.

https://www.zuken.com/en/products/pcb-design/cadstar

Free version (300 pins and 50 components) or 30 day full version trial: https://www.zuken.com/en/products/pcb-design/cadstar/resources/software/express

Only because (memory lane here) I worked on the Cadstar team some decades ago when it was still a DOS program by Racal-Redac. They were a great bunch of guys and girls.

Otherwise KiCad. http://kicad-pcb.org/
Because it's Free and Open Source, cross-platform and supported by CERN. https://home.cern/about/updates/2015/02/kicad-software-gets-cern-treatment

jmg

frank freedman wrote: »

Looking at schematic capture and PCB software again. Any opinions regarding ORCAD, EAGLE and the others? Leave price out of the equation at this point.

As above, it depends on what you want to do with the final output, and how you use it.
Also if you are Schematic-centric, or PCB-centric in your designs.

Eagle was swallowed into AutoDESK, and moved to subscription model, which caused some push-back.

Best to download some candidates and spend some time modifying an example design, to see how you like the 'feel'.
There are also Altium and Mentor PADS products, at higher price points. Both have free evals.
Digikey has a crippled Mentor offering, but it is very closed in order to turf-protect other Mentor products.
No ascii files, no scripts, and no exports. Avoid that as a dead-end.

Certainly, I'd suggest trying kiCAD - I've found the Shove Router very good, and the PCB side tolerable.
Their SCH side is due for revisions, not sure where that is on the road-map time lines.
KiCAD is ASCII files, and has good script support in the PCB side. (SCH side, less so )

There are increasing examples in KiCAD & KiCAD has an active community.
https://github.com/FPGAwars/icezum
https://olimex.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/ice40hx1k-evb-open-source-hardware-fpga-board-designed-with-kicad-and-working-with-icestorm-foss-toolchain-first-prototypes-are-ready-and-run/

http://www.xess.com/blog/giving-back-to-the-community/

Cluso99

I have an old licensed version of Protel v3.1 (circa 1995) that I use for pcb layout. I know this, warts and all but it will not run under windows 10. I always manually route my designs and I have built my own pad footprints, one set for hand soldering and another for screen print and reflow (I have a $5K oven).
I insert my own netlist for verification. Often my schematics are done after my pcb, rather than the normal schematic first.

I don't use the schematic section of Protel, rather preferring the freebie (sorry just cannot recall its name atm but there is a seperate pcb version that goes with it). It's an easy package and no restrictions that I have come across. It's just the basics, and schematic blocks/footprints are quite simple to build.

Leon

Many people from Racal-Redac left and purchased Number One Systems EasyPC which I had been using for some years. They then developed Pulsonix, which I switched to. Both are excellent packages and worth trying.