It seems much more common in the EDA world to reinvent the wheel - poorly.Īm I wrong? Are there any PCB design packages I'm not aware of that significantly improve the editing experience? In general, companies involved in music production aren't building digital audio workstations from the ground up, they create VST plugins VFX companies aren't building 3D modeling programs, they're just adding components to the rendering pipeline. What bothers me is that these are solved problems in architecture and other fields of engineering, where many specialized applications have been built on top of AutoCAD (using the ObjectARX plugin API) or MicroStation. But how much better does it get with an expensive commercial package like Altium? I don't want to seem overly negative here - the open source and inexpensive PCB design applications are very impressive for what they do, and good open source solutions don't even exist for other engineering fields so the situation here is better by default. Why does everything in PCB design have to be at 45 degree angles? PEDIT on a spline will discretize it into line segments (as required by Gerber files) with a customizable level of precision. I can make curvy traces using arcs and splines. If I want to match the lengths of traces, I can use LENGTHEN or EXTEND. If I want to cut a trace at an exact point, say a centerline running through pads, I can just use TRIM. If I want to take a component mechanical outline and generate a courtyard at a specific distance, I can also just select the outline and use OFFSET. In EAGLE/KiCad it seems I need to rely on the cartesian grid system or design rules for that specific trace to ensure an exact distance. If I want to create a parallel trace at an exact distance from another trace, I can just use OFFSET in AutoCAD. I'm not sure why, since a standard 2D computational geometry library like GEOS can handle most of these operations. In at least EAGLE and KiCad, simple geometric operations seem to be missing. Snap to one pad, type M to start moving, move cursor to snap to the other pad, then move your cursor horizontally to snap to the virtual intersection of the horizontal and vertical lines. Say you want to align the centers of two pads on different components to be at the same Y-position. Multiple dynamic snaps can be active at once, using object snap tracking. Or you can manually specify the angle, say 35 degrees by typing 5<35. I just move the cursor to snap to the corner, click, move it again to snap to a 45 degree angle using polar tracking, then type 5. Say I want to draw a line a distance of exactly 5 mm from the corner of a pad. In AutoCAD, there are numerous types of object snaps that can be quickly enabled/disabled - you're not just limited to snapping to a vertex or center of a pad. Dynamic input, object snap tracking, polar trackingĭue to different component pad sizes and a mix of metric/imperial dimensions on footprints, I found myself constantly resetting the grid origin and X/Y spacing in order to place track corners or vias at a specific distance from another feature.
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