Circuit designing software

[Abdul Samad]

Whats the best circuit designing software

[Guest]

Idk if this counts but ..
http://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/

[dany_boy]

1 minute ago, Abdul Samad said:

Whats the best circuit designing software

Depends on your needs, for quick and dirty designs, I like easy EDA. Its free, online and very easy to use. For more serious stuff I used to use eagle, but with the new subscription based thing, only the "hobby" version is available for free. I've heard that KiCAD EDA is also really good. There are many more out there, but those are the ones I like.

Cheers!

[TheRandomness]

@iFreilicht might know c:

[Unimportant]

What do you mean with "circuit designing". Do you mean circuit drawing (and PCB design) or simulators?

[dany_boy]

1 minute ago, Unimportant said:

What do you mean with "circuit designing". Do you mean circuit drawing (and PCB design) or simulators?

The whole package is called EDA = Electronic design automation. Eagle, EasyEDA, KiCAD EDA and many more are complete software that will handle schematics, PCBs and electrical rulings.

[Abdul Samad]

2 minutes ago, Unimportant said:

What do you mean with "circuit designing". Do you mean circuit drawing (and PCB design) or simulators?

what are simulators

 

[Abdul Samad]

9 minutes ago, dany_boy said:

Depends on your needs, for quick and dirty designs, I like easy EDA. Its free, online and very easy to use. For more serious stuff I used to use eagle, but with the new subscription based thing, only the "hobby" version is available for free. I've heard that KiCAD EDA is also really good. There are many more out there, but those are the ones I like.

Cheers!

I want a software that could give me all kind of resistor,capacitors,gates and all kinds of IC

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[dany_boy]

This video explains it very nicely. Simulator allow you to check out how a circuit would work in software without the need to actually build it. It has some limitations though, as most components are idealized.

[iFreilicht]

I'm using KiCAD for pretty intricate designs:

 

 

It's quite powerful, but takes a little while to learn.

 

EDIT: There is no "best" software for this job. If you want extensive support, paid software like Altium Designer might be the way to go, you could also try out Eagle. For me, KiCAD is the most useful because it's free, open source and has almost no limitations. Some things are less efficient than in the big software packages (panelisation for example), but in theory you can create a whole ATX motherboard with it if you wanted to.

[mariushm]

 

DIPTrace is free for small projects (300 or 600 holes/pads or something like that.. it's 300, but distributors are allowed to offer a free upgrade to 600 to people who request it nicely). It's cheap to buy the commercial license, it's cheap to go for more functionality, and upgrade from one version to the other by paying the difference.

It's quite good, i recommend checking it out.

 

Zuken CADSTAR (and company) is good, it was used (and probably still is) heavily by Sony .. they have a free version with limited number of layers and components/holes/pads. It's used heavily in Japan and thereabouts but less in Europe or US and may be expensive to upgrade to less restricted versions.

 

Proteus is ok and has a bunch of simulators and stuff that may be useful

 

Kicad is acceptable if you're willing to spend time learning and working around some of its limitations .. it's downright great if you consider it's open source and you won't pay for anything with it.

 

Eagle is OK for small projects but it has some limitations, more limited compared to Diptrace for example.

 

Altium makes some great pcb design tools but it's very expensive and older versions used to favor Intel machines and had crashes on system with AMD and they were 32bit only so with large projects they used to crash often.

 

Newer versions are leaning towards cloud and subscriptions like Adobe products which makes me reluctant to pay hundreds of dollars for one. 

I'd rather pay something like 500-1000$ and have a retail version with maybe a serial number or a dongle and no DRM or internet connection required to have it working a few years from now.