Circuit maker vs eagle how to#

I spend quite a lot of time these days making my own parts if they either arent available as part of EAGLE, or I dont like the variants they have to offer.

Circuit maker vs eagle how to#

Learn how to make your own parts, and you can have as many and what ever you want. If or when I need to exceed the 300 hole limits of free DipTrace that would still be a sensible choice for me. There are various other free/trial versions of other CAD programs that I have not tried so there may be better or more flexible ones but for my purposes I believe I have found what I needed. Based on my limited trial of these 3 free packages I found DipTrace the easiest to use and learn. However for small scale hobby use ease of learning is very important as one desires results relatively quickly and a long learning curve is very frustrating for what is often an occasional use. I can't answer for Professional use as I do not have that experience and once a particular CAD product is fully understood it obviously becomes much easier to use. It allowed me to quickly create a small PCB, 3 channel mixer, with minimum frustration. DipTrace was for me the easiest and certainly the most straightforward.

It does have tremendous flexibility but the learning curve for KiCad was very frustrating. KiCad I found fine for the schematic but it became steadily more difficult when moving to the PCB layout.

In the case of Express it is overall an expensive solution, although fairly easy to use, because one has to use Express for producing the PCB. Just as a hobbyist I have recently tried to use a small number of free CAD programs namely Express, KiCad and Diptrace.