If you know ahead of time about any such limitations with the fabrication house then take care while routing the PCB.ħ. There is no way to get error for same net in kicad. The fabrication house I went to had some limitations for same net via to via clearance. You can use plot function to plot to pdf but if you want to print specific things on the top layer for your assembly guy then you are up for a disappointment. KiCad's print function is broken in general. Once is that there is no way to say “unroute this net” as I want to route it the other way. However some small issues still will irritate you here. The PCB tool gives some relief and happiness as it comes with lot of features you will get with advanced tools. Once you go finish drawing the schematic, manage to get the BOM and create a netlist next comes the PCB. Unrouting net – no option in the UI to just unroute a net. There are plugins available once you google but this will need about half a day for a new person to understand and implement.Ĥ. There is no nice “create BOM” option built in with Kicad as with almost all of the tools i have used so far. The last thing i expected to get stuck with is creating BOM from schematic. Also renaming libraries or changing their location will break the link from schematic or PCB to the libraries so be very careful when it comes to libraries linking.ģ. You will need to copy or backup entire project every time since schematic and PCB every time fetches symbols and footprints from libraries. The solution is to clone all the KiCAD libraries to a local location on your computer, and then point KiCAD to this location. Also you just can’t copy/backup a schematic or a PCB file and think that you have copied the data. For one, all libraries are hosted online, and KiCAD needs to look them up every time you fire it up. KiCAD keeps schematic symbols and component footprints in separate libraries and you need to link a symbol to a footprint using one of several different methods. Managing symbols, footprints and libraries is not easy: Overall, it is a pain to create new designs with new names from existing ones and for me this is the biggest drawback of the tool.Ģ. You will have to rename all the subfiles and create a new netlist and yet some library issue might still create problems. You may copy the project to a few folder but renaming the files will create all sorts of issues. There is no nice way to create a new project from the existing one. Cannot Save a project and create a new one from existing one In this article I will write more in detail about the issues with KiCad tool which I faced during my design.ġ. But that was after some happy and lot of frustrating time with the tool. I did manage to get PCBs fabricated, assembled and tested successfully. Since the free use of Diptrace is limited I went ahead with my first PCB design with KiCad. Of them following tools came forward as possible winners. Few months ago I wrote an article to compare the various EDA tools available for the “not so rich” designer.
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