<story><title>Intro to modern hardware prototyping</title><url>http://obogason.com/modern_hardware_prototyping/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krapht</author><text>Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you&amp;#x27;re going cheap, I&amp;#x27;d stick with KiCAD. It&amp;#x27;s unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I&amp;#x27;ve also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it.&lt;p&gt;If you have any academic links at all though, or don&amp;#x27;t mind piracy, I&amp;#x27;d grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling. If you ever make it big, these are the tools you want to learn and know how to use. You don&amp;#x27;t mention anything about a good debugger - this is crucial! If you work with ARM the Segger JLink is the gold standard.&lt;p&gt;Also you should probably mention where to get cheap stencils, like Osh Stencils etc. With all the cheap parts going to extra small packages, stencils are a godsend. Or, just have your prototype made in China at any of the small board-houses - quite cheap as well compared to the time you might spend doing board assembly.&lt;p&gt;Just my quick 2c.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akiselev</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m very much against software piracy but if you&amp;#x27;re starting out in electrical engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence, Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software is a naive port of the pen and paper schematic design process to mouse and keyboard (it&amp;#x27;s still called &amp;quot;schematic capture&amp;quot; in contrast to &amp;quot;PCB design&amp;quot;) but Altium has moved far beyond that, especially with the introduction of cloud features in the last five years (like an online repository for user and vendor created footprints). The field of electrical engineering has been extremely averse to the ideas of open source but for many reasons, Altium&amp;#x27;s online resources among them, that is finally starting to change. Eagle does have a large community with companies like Sparkfun and Adafruit but those pale in comparison to the community forming around Altium, which is made up of a large number of vendors and professionals who are starting to grasp the benefits of sharing data.&lt;p&gt;Considering how much the package costs and how much Altium benefits from the growing community, I honestly don&amp;#x27;t think they&amp;#x27;d mind if you pirated the software a few years before you could afford it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Intro to modern hardware prototyping</title><url>http://obogason.com/modern_hardware_prototyping/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krapht</author><text>Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you&amp;#x27;re going cheap, I&amp;#x27;d stick with KiCAD. It&amp;#x27;s unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no restrictions on functionality. I&amp;#x27;ve also heard decent things about CircuitMaker, but never used it.&lt;p&gt;If you have any academic links at all though, or don&amp;#x27;t mind piracy, I&amp;#x27;d grab a student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for mechanical modeling. If you ever make it big, these are the tools you want to learn and know how to use. You don&amp;#x27;t mention anything about a good debugger - this is crucial! If you work with ARM the Segger JLink is the gold standard.&lt;p&gt;Also you should probably mention where to get cheap stencils, like Osh Stencils etc. With all the cheap parts going to extra small packages, stencils are a godsend. Or, just have your prototype made in China at any of the small board-houses - quite cheap as well compared to the time you might spend doing board assembly.&lt;p&gt;Just my quick 2c.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wgj</author><text>The team at CERN has made big improvements to KiCad, including the push and shove router: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=CCG4daPvuVI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=CCG4daPvuVI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another good reason to think about KiCad is if you care about open formats (vs. Altium for example.) CERN&amp;#x27;s own statement [1]: &amp;quot;We think that KiCad can do to PCB design what the gcc compiler did to software: ensure there are no artificial barriers to sharing so that design and development knowledge can flow more freely.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ohwr.org&amp;#x2F;projects&amp;#x2F;cern-kicad&amp;#x2F;wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ohwr.org&amp;#x2F;projects&amp;#x2F;cern-kicad&amp;#x2F;wiki&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>