New Boards!

New Boards

My next bunch of boards from Seeed studio have arrived.  Here's some shots of parting out the prototypes from 10 x 15 cm panels.

Build and test info coming... as soon as I build and test.

What's All This KiCAD Stuff, Anyhow?

Going Open Source CAD

As can be seem from various post's here, I'm an Altium user.  I'm lucky enough to have access to it work, and I've been using it since it was good old Autotrax for DOS.   Yes, I'm that old....

For work that's fine but with my home projects I'm keen on sharing these as Open Source Hardware and releasing designs in Altium goes against the grain here - the community prefers that you share using open source tools.

So with this in mind, I decided to take the plunge and try KiCAD.  My following thoughts will be comparisons between 'what I know' about Altium and what my impression are about KiCAD and I fear it will be far from fair.  Altium does set the bar, and thus my expectations of what a PCB CAD tool can do, pretty high...

It Can Be Done!

And besides, I need something to do while I wait for my next revision of Alarm PCBs to land....