Hi Steve,
Yet another CAD curmudgeon, lurker, and Altium Designer user.
Please do report back on your experiences, good and bad.
One nugget I'll pass along is to not believe anyone's claims of "autorouting", a.k.a. the holy-grail-of-P.C.B.-layout-design.
Although from your description, your design may be trivial enough to be done manually anyways.
Oh, and yet another nugget: creating your own component footprints is always faster and least error-prone
compared to searching, verifying, and modifying (if need be) any footprints that you require.
Best of luck.
Craig, AMTELCO
-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris Knudsen
Sent: Friday December 04 2015 16:11
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [TN] Process guy looking to start trying to do board layout...
Hi Steve,
Good luck on this little adventure. For the sake of my curiosity, consider KiCad, and report what you find.
I've been forced to play a bit with Eagle (Arduino side-projects and the like), and it does seem to have its own very-unique work flow. However, as previously mentioned, there is a large existing user base for support.
Like Shawn, I use Altium for day-to-day work. I like it, but would not recommend it for small projects with small budgets.
Please let us know how it goes. Don't hesitate to ask us for help!
Regards,
Chris
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Knudsen, Principal Engineer • *New England Research, Inc.* • 331 Olcott Dr Ste L1 • White River Junction, VT 05001 • USA [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> • www.ner.com <http:www.ner.com> •
Phone: +1-802-296-2401
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 12/4/2015 1:16 PM, Larry Joy wrote:
> Try KiCad (KEE-CAD). It's free and CERN is working on it to improve it.
>
> Larry Joy
> -----Original Message----- From: Steve Gregory
> Sent: Friday, December 04, 2015 12:31 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [TN] Process guy looking to start trying to do board layout...
>
> Hi All,
>
> Many of you know me, and know that most of my career has been a hands-on,
> out on the production floor kind of process guy , but now I'm looking at
> trying to do board layout.
>
> Yeah, yeah I know, forget about it. But I'm not looking to do anything
> complicated, it's a small 1" X 2.85", 2-layer board with 3-LED's, a
> through-hole right angle push button switch, 5-holes that a little wire
> harness can be soldered into, and two mounting holes.
>
> I've often thought about learning more about board design and layout, but
> my plate always fills up with the day-to-day production and process
> issues
> so I wind up pushing that off to the back burner and don't think about it
> again for a while. So now the idea has popped up again. The story is that
> we build this little board for a customer and now they want to change the
> size and layout and use a different switch. So my boss asks me if this is
> something I can do, we don't have any design guys here. I have Pentalogix
> ViewMate Deluxe and do gerber edits to apertures in the solder paste
> layers
> for the stencils I buy, but don't really change the layout of boards,
> ViewMate is not meant for that. I explain that to him and he asks if he
> bought the software would this be something that I would be interested in
> doing, so now the opportunity has presented itself again.
>
> So I've been looking around and I'm not looking the buy a seat at a
> full-blown CAD station, just something inexpensive and simple to use. So
> I've been looking at Eagle, and my question is, have any of you used
> this?
> Is this software a good starting point for a rookie like me? I know there
> is an IPC Designers Council forum, but those guys are so far ahead of me
> that I don't want to waste their time. Any feedback is welcome.
>
> Steve
>
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