Comments on Profile Post by ultrabike

The learning curve tho.

Not bad actually. I followed a quick youtube tutorial and laid out a board with a uP all the way from schematic to gerbers in no time. Pretty complete package. :) Will do some more tutorials tho.

At school, long time ago, I used PSpice for simulation. Test driving LTSpice as well. So far so good.

I'm sort of motivated to do my own not-CMoy (hate that term though, it's a f'ing single stage, uncompensated, non-inverting amplifier, some really just current buffers, driven by 1 or 2 9V batteries and w/o any circuit/load protection). not-CMoy (UB-1), may be more than one stage, and may never see the light of day. Time will say.

Agreed. Especially 4.0.X. Moving all my stuff to that rev now. It's nice to be able to work on boards on a Mac, as well.

You want a learning curve, try Altium. Barf. No thanks, we don't need teamware for 100 engineers in 18 countries.

Jason!!! Yeah, I asked a few colleges @ work and that's what they use (KiCAD). It's pretty straight forward to use IMO. And indeed, it seems it works well with Mac. Have some ideas. Nothing special or new really. Hobby audio stuff.

May do some other stuff as well with it. Always wanted to do this, but life takes one through all sorts of different paths. I always loved electronics though and was relatively good at it.

DSP and DigiComm caught my attention and did more Sys/FW/Verilog than this other stuff. We'll see where it takes us. Fun :)

Were the tutorials Chris Gammell's by any chance?

Haven't done that yet. I did this one by Winsor Schmidt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK3rDhJqMu0

He changed the design loads of times in the middle, and did not explain how to do through vias stuff. But easy enough to figure out.

Cool, I'll check that one out-- Asked cause I hang out with Chris in cleveland at times. (He's EEVBlog's (Dave Jones) podcast counterpart)

I went through some of EEVBlog's stuff. Really awesome stuff. Went through one about SMT and stencils.

Yep, I really like Kicad, especially since the new push and shove router (saves tons of time on stupid shit like control lines for relays) and since they've gotten the cross-platform stuff really working. All of our analog stuff is done on it. Mike still uses Altium, but he's weakening...

The only downsides are just some operational oddities (importing stuff from different schematics, etc.) But they keep improving that...

Sounds like I should revisit. I'm noob, so maybe that's why it looked overwhelming at first. Eagle and DipTrace felt more inviting for me at first glance.

I tried another package from PCB Express some time ago. Can't touch this.