apluscw wrote: > > Regarding KiCad, on more than one occasion I have questioned whether > we made the right decision going with KiCad. We were burdened by the > fact that we needed 3 seats and none of the "professional" packages > were economically viable at that time. > > While I still have reservations, now that I am making a point to > create every component in my own library before using things are > flowing much, much better. There are still some > bugs/features/strange behaviors that bother us, but it looks like it > will be OK for schematic capture. > > Board layout, however, is a different matter. While we did an > initial evaluation, it is still unproven in our eyes. If we > outsourced the layout to someone who could do it in KiCad, then we > would forever be able to tweak it if need be. >
I second what has been said above, by your description it looks like a long shot for KiCAD, people who specilise in that kind of work use EDA packages that can calculate noise/emissions etc. Price is not what you should be looking at when chossing EDA tools for work. That might sound odd coming from someone like me who looked at KiCAD when faced with a $1500 dollar bill for upgrading my commercial package to go over 700 pins. But my boards are much simpler, they are 2 layer and just have lots of interface stuff (connecters, fuseholders, relays etc that are modified to customer requirements. I miffed a bit at paying for a package that included spice emulation and upto 6 layers or whatever that I just did not need. In my line of work a more complicated package could slow me down rather than speed me up! I did however look at other low cost simple packages, to see if they better suited my needs, and KiCAD does compare favourably. The fact that it is OSS is a great bonus.
