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HARDCORE techie design question ???

LPSpinner

pfm Member
Hi Guys,

I mainly work in a design support role in a predominantly MCAD environment. I have just finished transitioning from a PRO/E & CATIA to a SOLIDWORKS only role. My new SOLIDWORKS license bundle gives me access to SOLIDWORKS’s CIRCUITWORKS add-in so I am keen to give the whole ECAD caper a shot.

I’m not about to sink a whole lot of capital into something like ALTIUM, Protius or one of the high-end, "big boy" ECAD suites but I have been eyeing off KiCAD as an open source comprehensive bundle that still gives me Hierarchical circuit design, spice simulation as well as PCB design with some sort of auto-routing or auto track generating functionality. It appears to have a comprehensive library of semiconductors and editing or adding to the parts library is also facilitated. Good quality 3D CAD models also appear to be very doable for integration into downstream mechanical assemblies. Could be just the ticket for making up virtual designs from the ground up for my next Audio project. The best thing is that virtual components and virtual PCB's don’t cost anything to make …:D

As my background is from the mechanical engineering / manufacturing & product development side of things I’m curious to see what you specialist electronics design guys would typically use and what’s the go for integrating MCAD and ECAD on a budget ... (obviously open source and/or free-ware is way to go).

LPSPinner.


PS: here’s some CAD renderings of a little phono preamp I’ve been playing with at the moment. Making up the PCB assembly in SOLIDWORKS was a bit of a fiddle and at the moment there is no design intelligence in the model of the PCB other the packaging geometry. The case on the other hand has all the sheet metal information, Unfolded sheet blank geometry and the front facia will be 3D printed on a fancy HiRes 3D Printer that I am soon to have access to.

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I have used two systems for circuit design. On Linux, I have used the free gEda suite, with the pcb layout tool. This use the ngspice simulation engine. It is possible to have full traceability from schematic captur, through simulation, to pcb layout verification, although there are number of awkward steps to make that work. I've not used it for a couple of years, and the current versions may be more polished.

On Windows I use LTspice for schematic capture and simulation, but haven't done any PCB layouts.
 
I use KiCAD for hobby stuff, don't bother with 3D for pcb, although it is supported. LTSpice for simulation on Linux using Wine.
 
I use KiCAD for hobby stuff, don't bother with 3D for pcb, although it is supported. LTSpice for simulation on Linux using Wine.

I was surprised and pleased to find that LTSpice appears to be tuned to run cleanly under Wine. The next best thing to making it "properly" portable.

BugBear
 


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