Comment by contingencies
10 days ago
KiCAD has pretty awful UX though
It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good these days. By EE standards it's positively awesome. Single platform vendor toolchain hell is why people leave commercial software and move to KiCad, which runs everywhere, is open source, and has a plugin architecture plus mostly every feature you could ever need except high end simulation (which just needs time).
Has anyone tried EasyEDA? I hear people raving about it, but I don't know if it's because of the tight integration with LCSC, the availability of symbols and footprints, or if it's really that good.
EasyEDA is basically a single-supply-chain web-SaaS alternative to open source multi-platform KiCad. Not a smart thing to invest time in. Furthermore, its design library is of worse than dubious quality. The vast majority of shared designs are probably non-functional to dangerous.
Ok, but it is easy to drag and drop components from lcsc. Sounds like an enormous time saver. But you're probably right about the lock-in.
Anyway, I'm waiting for AI that is smart enough to read a datasheet and convert it to a KiCad symbol and footprint. Should be around the corner.
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