Why are poorly supported pcb layout packages so popular?

Eagle is one of the less "user friendly" packages

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Your opinion is appreciated, though I have just layed out a 4 layer emergency light pcb with eagle comprising 2 smps, a 64 pin micro + other analog cctry, -I had to design it aswell, in a short timeframe, so their was no time for getting stuck like I do with high end packages.
I find it very user friendly.
I never got stuck.
And many thanks indeed to Keith1200hrs as Keith was one of the great people who provided some of the forum help I needed to get the eagle job done.

If kicad really is supported as well as eagle then i'm up for it. But I doubt this. 3D of itself isn't too interesting to myself , but 3D incorporatable into mechanical collision checking by sharing with mech packages is of interest.

Also I am not sure if eagle does dxf import?...so if kicad does that then im on for it.
Also, I am not sure if eagle does bus routing?
What in eagle is not "user friendly"?

I agree treez that Eagle IS user friendly. It has the essential features/ requirements of many users which means that the menu's are not too deep. This also means you can come back to it and pick it up with speed. There are many excellent designs produced by that package, but due to users falling into 'camps' you will never get agreement on what is easist to use/user friendly/most poweful/professional/......

Having used them, in my opinion this also applies to both Proteus and DesignSpark PCB which I like very much, each with different features/methods of use.

The deciding factor in my choice for commercial use is DesignSpark PCB on the grounds of board size and layers and licensing, it is free for commercial use.
Proteus and Eagle both have significant costs (for me) at the level I require for my business.
So this is one reason Eagle gets tagged as being a hobbyist product.

The other big issue that biases opinion to any product is the learning curve that you go up. This makes any change of design package difficult as you have to learn the 'new' method of working and you often hear "my other package is much better, I only have to do............", but that's because you have learn't what to do yet!
So there will always be (in my view) some negative opinion when evaluating a new/different product, hence user stick to the camp they know!

If I were a beginner, the choice of packages presented to choose from is a difficult decision. Eagle would be a good start with its established user base, many beginners and a forum (and probably free as I would be in education). But if you are a commercial user or are planning to become one, I would jump to the free package DesignSpark PCB which offers fairly unlimited size and layer restrictions. It's not perfect, but is developing at a rate of knots and has a growing forum and seems to be being taken up in the educational world.

Eagle may be fine if your just wanting to produce reasonably simple PCB's but if you want to be able to scale things up into thw world of SI etc then you will need a higher spec package.

I.e. I doubt a computer motherboard would be done on Eagle.

I agree I wouldn't lay out a PC motherboard with Eagle (or any other package!) but are they the only "professional" PCBs being designed and made? Are all other boards simple? Most of my designs are for industrial, military, aerospace and medical applications. I rarely need more than 6 layers and Eagle is fine for my designs. These include high speed designs with 40GHz SiGe:C devices, 100A ns pulse drivers, pW photodetectors, HEMT amplifiers, SERDES links ... Are these all simple designs which are for the hobbyists and students that Eagle is only suitable for?

Keith

I do not understand why Altium Designer is marked here as a complex package. I did my first design in Altium using the simplest tools. I was quite fast to progress with the PCB layout. Another story if you intend only to use these simple features in future and pay big bucks for Altium. Then probably its not worth it. Altium leaves a lot of room to increase design speed and efficiency. I foresee that in 2-3 projects I will double my current speed of layout.
Altium Live forums are ususally enough for quick help search.
The only taboo for me in Altium for now is complex sheets for multi-channel use. I will try to avoid it in future, as I had quite a downtime with my last multi-channel design, but this is one of the Altium's advanced features.

Careful, this may turn out to be one of these threads and Keith will have to tell himself off :razz:

All PCB CAD packages are different and offer different facilities, functions and outputs that different people want because their requirements are different. So they all pay a different price for it.

Oh - to answer the original question - most likely because they are free.

Oh - to answer the original question - most likely because they are free.

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The original question polemically associates "poorly supported" with relative expensive packages (Altium Designer and factor ten upwards) if I understood it correctly.

Although there are some xxx software is better than xxx software arguments around, the discussion is getting beyond it when talking about different user and demand profiles.

An important point that should be considered: Most professional engineers doing PCB design are part-time PCB designers, spending less than 25 and often less than 5 percent of their time with PCB design. Intuitive operation and a fast learning curve of a design tool are priceless in this situation.

Time is money and the time spent to master a tool (or search for existing but hidden features...) can be well charged up against one-time and running fees of a commercial package. In so far being free isn't a quality on it's own. But as we also know, expensive packages aren't necessarily user friendly (although they are surely well supported).

I'd been through three pcb layout packages and struggled, I then came to Eagle Pro and did a 4 layer board with 2 smps's, one 64 pin micro, and hods of analog circuitry, and it was a dream, I never once got stuck, due to the availability of loads of google type help, and general forum support.

I agree a computer motherboard isn't a job for eagle though.....for a start I don't think eagle does bus routing, track pushing, or track stopping(?)

It's good that Eagle fits your demand. This sounds plausible to me because I know a number of professional engineers that are succesfully using Eagle or have been using it. Eagle is not my personal preference, but I have been using it ocasionally when supporting a customer's project and have no reason to fight against it.

I like the ULP concept, and the latest switch to a XML design description makes it interesting as a platform for various conversion tools. Unfortunately it has no interface to the industry standard Specctra autorouter.

treez said:

I often hear this...


or remarks like "eagle is crude"
or "eagle is just a toy"
or "you cant lay out a pcb properly in eagle"

I have never ever , ever heard one single reason given by the makers of such statements...never. These statements are never qualified with good old engineering reason.

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I have to admit you make a good point. I'm not an Eagle user, but often hear the same comments, and looking at some example designs done in Eagle, I jumped to the conclusion that it's not a "serious program". But reading here, and other places, the program has a large user base and that can't be denied, so you know what? I decided to "see for myself" and give this program a good, honest, trial. So a question to the hardcore Eagle users: what do you recommend to do to get off to a fast start to learn the program? I'd like to get to a point where I can do a 4-6 layer board with split power planes and a mix of SMT and through- hole components. If I run into any roadblocks, I'll try for myself the support network.

Most professional PCB designers spend 99% of their time designing PCBs.
Most professional packages (or more expensive ones) you have to pay maintenance for support.
I have used quite a few PCB layout packages and have been able to design PCBs on all of them...:grin:

DonnyP

Just download the free version and use it. Its not hard and you will find the interface superior to the point and click of other
packages once you get in the habit of using the keyboard again.

You can get some good free support on usenet if you are not ready to buy the full maintenance package.
Go to usenet and read some of the messages - I think there are about 3 or 4 newsgroups for eagle that get daily
use.
And of course the web is full of users. What you ask for is well within eagle's capabilities.

(I have no axe to grind here - just my experience - but I don't design full time )

i found that diptrace is also a good pcb designing software

FvM said:

It's good that Eagle fits your demand. This sounds plausible to me because I know a number of professional engineers that are succesfully using Eagle or have been using it. Eagle is not my personal preference, but I have been using it ocasionally when supporting a customer's project and have no reason to fight against it.

I like the ULP concept, and the latest switch to a XML design description makes it interesting as a platform for various conversion tools. Unfortunately it has no interface to the industry standard Specctra autorouter.

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Pretty much my own position. Spectra would be nice but I consider XML a backward step into a nightmare of inneficiency.

So far, so good. I haven't had time to dig deep into the program yet but one positive right off the bat was I was able to go to the cadsoft website and download the program, then immediately download their tutorial and manual in a manner of minutes without any hassles of providing all my details so I can be hounded by salespeople. To me, this first step was very positive. I was able to get everything that's needed, and easily installed, very quickly.

As a counter example for a bad experience with Altium, if one is not an existing Altium customer, but your are interested in evaluating the program, you practically have to donate a kidney and possibly some blood just to get a trial. They make you create an Altium Live account, and you have to provide tons of details, then once they have that, the Altium sales force becomes like a virus that just won't go away. They do the same thing if you try to obtain their free *viewer*. You have to apply for an "Altium Live" account and wait up to a week to get "approved" just to get the free viewer! That's rediculous. What if a company is providing a design service for someone, and their customer doesn't own Altium, but they want to review your work using the free viewer? Yes, that's right, they too will have to create a full blown "Altium Live" account and then wait to get "approved" to download the viewer. Then they will get many sales calls, then guess what happens? They eventually buy the program, and then they no longer need to outsource. So, companies that do design as a service using Altium, run the risk of losing their customers because of Altium if they wind up buying the program. Good sales tactics Altium. Fail.

Out of curiosity, what do you do if your design gets corrupted in Eagle?

When you can no longer open it etc?

Good question. I have done maybe 100 boards with it and it has never happened. It has crashed, mostly in earlier versions such as version 3.xx but it has never corrupted the files. It does make automatic backups, 3 by default but I used to run with 9, but I have never needed them.

This was in contrast to Ultiboard years ago which would corrupt the file with a crash (although a bit of hacking with an editor would actually recover it).

Keith

Most professional PCB designers spend 99% of their time designing PCBs.

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Sounds like a definition of "professional PCB designer". But which percentage of PCBs in industry is designed by this specialist, and which by the said part-time PCB designers?

Most small and medium-sized enterprises that I know don't employ any "99%" PCB designers. They either have their PCB design performed by engineers among other duties or dedicate it to external service providers (which may be "99%" PCB designers, but not necessarily).

Thanks for all these.
I understand that it's very difficult for any one person to become proficient with multiple packages, so we all adopt just one package (partly because that's the package where we have our libraries).
Of course, once we have adopted that package, we are all then biased toward that package, as we will then have more ease getting work using that package....and also, we want our package to thrive, so that hopefully the vendor will cut costs due to having such a big customer base.

So I can appreciate that we are all biased toward the particular package that we have adopted.

I adopted eagle solely because I believed it had more general internet support than any other package...........I have found that its far better in this respect than the other three packages I previously used in this respect.

Though for the other packages mentioned here....Proteus, diptrace, designspark, kicad, dex, vutrax, easypc......which of these has loads of freely available support to be found on the www?
(I mean stiff like general forum support, youtube videos, etc etc)..basically , can I type in a problem to google and find much help on the pcb issue, whatever it is .?

Well...

The Kicad user group has over 4,100+ members, 16,200+ posts on the Yahoo user group. Several other support web sites other than their own. Several free utilities, including on-line library parts builders and a user suplied parts library (as well as the one included in the package) of several thousand parts. I just typed "Kicad" in to Youtube's search box and came up with "about 2,400 results" as the reply. That's not an insignificant number.

Brian.