Hello all, I'm looking for some advice on choosing a PCB tool. I am new to PCB design. I've done FPGA RTL and embedded RTOS, and such professionally, but I've never done my own PCB's. I like what I can see with Kicad, but I will be using Mac OS X as my operating system. I've gotten it to compile on Mac OS X, but it is clumsy at this point. (That's probably being a little generous too.) There doesn't seem to be a lot of Mac OS X support. It looks like the last post about a Mac OS X port was in August. My first question, is there any actual interest in a Mac OS X port? I can probably help make it better; but I don't want to spend all my "free" time improving the tools, and not doing any PCB design.
Second, there are a handful of alternatives for Mac OS. Osmond PCB, EAGLE, McCAD, PCBWarrior, Elektro CAD. Does anyone have any opinions of these alternatives? I'm not trying to troll for trouble here -- just some honest feedback. For just about every tool I've ever used for this type of stuff (and embedded debug, etc.) investing time into learning the tool is a lot of investment, I don't want to waste my effort if I can avoid it. I don't mind pitching in some to a Kicad to Mac OS X port, but like I said, I also want to get other stuff done. And if it matters, I'm looking at designing some moderately complex boards. Some mixed signal, ARM + FPGA + ethernet + wifi. ARM + FPGA + GPS module + radio modem. So I'm sure I will be digging into Johnson's Black Magic to help me along the way. I doubt there is any kind of open source equivalent to Hyperlinx or Maxwell? Would this type of board design impact my tool choice? (And yes, I do have some very experienced board design friends to help me out, but I would like to do it mostly on my own.) Thanks, Chris Inacio
