I would actually urge anyone to check out KiCAD instead, not just as well.
The only merit Fritzings has against a thriving open ecosystem such as KiCAD is its dumbed down interface that would make it more accessible to beginners. However, if you want to use it without paying €8, you have to compile it from source, which makes this whole point mute.
Yes, KiCAD is the best if you're a beginner, want something free, and actually intend to go through the (considerable) effort of designing a PCB and have it fabricated for real. You can do complex designs and take advantage of really nice features and rule-checks. It's very much an 80% solution to a hard problem and more than enough for hobbyists.
For paid/non-free, some of Altium's offerings would be the next step up, along with Fusion-360. I haven't tried Fusion-360 ECAD. I do know that Autodesk bought Eagle, but it's not clear to me if Fusion-360 is using Eagle for schematic capture and PCB?
After that, it's big-boy tools like mentor or cadence. These are overkill for hobbyists unless the man is paying for your seat.
As a rank beginner, I was able to use Fritzing to design and get printed a simple board (~10 elements) with little effort. Yes, for anything more complex I would want to invest the time in learning a more powerful tool, but KICAD is more the next step than "the best if you're a beginner".
After that, it's big-boy tools like mentor or cadence. These are overkill for hobbyists unless the man is paying for your seat.
I've heard that the really expensive EDA tools are like Adobe Photoshop --- everyone experimenting/learning tends to just pirate them, and then end up at a company which does pay for them.
Yeah, it looks really tempting to have seamless electronics/PCB + mechanical CAD tool. I was wondering if anyone had some experience they could share with producing PCB's using the Fusion-360 toolchain.
I've used it for mechanical and I found it extremely polished and intuitive and totally worth the subscription for that alone, but I have neither the time nor project (yet) to go down the rabbit hole of learning the ECAD functions of Fusion-360.
The problem with Fritzing is that it is so much "dumbed down" that it is mostly useless. It doesn't even enforce basic design constraints such as having the PCB traces horizontal/vertical/45deg angle or clearances.
Well, to be fair, the 0/45/90 deg traces are a byproduct from early days of EDA CAD products. Aside high frequency busses (which you're doing EM analysis on anyways), traces can be all sorts of shapes. That 3v3 or 5v line can have 135deg traces - they might be ugly, but they're very doable. This is a case where early electronic CAD turned into a cargo-cult.
Prior to the early computing CAD days, the traces were really rounded and flowing, and had teardrop fills. They were also done freehand, with transparencies, markers, and tape.
> Well, to be fair, the 0/45/90 deg traces are a byproduct from early days of EDA CAD products. Aside high frequency busses (which you're doing EM analysis on anyways), traces can be all sorts of shapes.
The constraint is still there. Curved traces make your GUI ridiculously unmanageable. Ever tried to manipulate font outlines? It's like that on a PCB, only an order of magnitude worse. You have to operate control points for every single segment rather than just dragging a trace. All for effectively no benefit on 99.9% of all PCB designs.
In fact, the only good argument for using non-Euclidean traces is in the ultra-high-speed arena (think DDR4 bus or multi-GHz RF). If traces are small enough that they fit between the PCB weave, different traces can have enough difference in electrical permittivity that it will screw up the matching (trace 1 has an FR-4 fiber directly underneath while trace 2 only has cross fibers underneath and so has about 50% air underneath instead of 100% fiberglass). Consequently, you have to swing the angles to weird things like multiples of 7 or 13 degrees to prevent that.
The premise of your comment is excellent - the fiber weave effect you describe is not often considered although the two dielectric materials contained are glass bundles and resin (instead of air). I would highly recommend Bert Simonovich's publications for anyone interested in more ([1] for example). It's worth noting that DDR4 isn't really fast enough to consider "non-Euclidean" traces, though when it comes to the weave you should always be working with your fabricator to use mechanically spread glass adjacent to these high speed signals.
For anyone with more questions in this area of high speed digital design, feel free to reach out to me (contact info in profile) - I love the topic.
The other good argument is when designing FPCs (flexible PCBs) --- where gentle curves reduce stress concentrations that can cause cracking and delamination.
> its dumbed down interface that would make it more accessible to beginners.
I guess it depends on who you are, but I tried it and noped away in under 30 minutes. I understand how this might be a valuable learning tool in a classroom environment, but the restrictions it has around components and design are too much for a hobbyist experimenting.
Another merit of Fritzing is the integrated breadboard layout, linked with the schematic. Often I want to try the design out with a breadboard with DIP chips to see how things work, and also to provide a breadboard layout for people that don't want to order a PCB.
Compilation is easy, and there's really not that much common ground between CAD and knowing the rote actions to compile something. I wouldn't even say there's a lot of common ground between programming and CAD.
The only merit Fritzings has against a thriving open ecosystem such as KiCAD is its dumbed down interface that would make it more accessible to beginners. However, if you want to use it without paying €8, you have to compile it from source, which makes this whole point mute.