What is the best Program to Design PCB

[Yousef Musawa]

Hi Engineers

I used to use workbench Program to design simple Parallel and Series circuits during collages days.

Now I want to build a new production line in the factory where I work in.
In this production line I want to manufacture some simple light drivers ( Converter from AC 220v to DC 6-8-12-15-20v ) on PCBs

So My Question : what is the best and simple Program for design PCB ?

thank you

 

[hevans1944]

They ALL require climbing a steep learning curve. The more expensive programs do a lot of housekeeping for you and may have better "automatic" wire routers. It is best to purchase a program with integrated schematic capture that is backwards-linked to the PCB layout function. All of them are forward-linked: change the schematic, change the board traces. But if you make a production-floor change, substitute a part for example, it is nice to have that propagate backwards to the schematic and to the Bill of Materials.

That said, I have only owned three PCB circuit design tools: PADS (Mentor Graphics), Ivex (now defunct), and now EAGLE. I may obtain KiCAD in the near future because (1) its free and (2) my free trial of EAGLE expired before I could do anything with it. The PADS program was purchased in the 1990s and delivered on 3.5" floppy disks with a dongle. Yuck! I hate dongles. I used it just once, for an entrepreneurial product, and billed the cost to the customer. I didn't like PADS because it replaced the Windows OS with its own OS when it ran. A maintenance subscription was out of the question. Ivex was okay, but the company went out of business and offered a "last chance" purchase of WinDraft, WinBoard, SPICE, etc. with not limits on pins or traces or layers. But no source code, so not a chance of fixing bugs now that Ivex is no longer in business. EAGLE seems to be popular and widely used, but the full-blown version is expensive.

The answer to your question is there is NO best and simple program for PCB design. But I would look at KiCAD and DipTrace before spending any money on commercial software. Check out this forum link to see what others have to say about KiCAD versus EAGLE. I also downloaded DipTrace last year but haven't used it yet for PCB design. Here is a link to the EEVblog forum for a discussion of EAGLE versus Dip Trace.

 

[pgib8]

I used Altium in the past and yes PCB software is complicated but I thought that Altium was too difficult to learn. I have used gEDA PCB which is free. It's a total pain in the butt, I have to edit some files manually to get things done but it does work and it is free. Now for my all-time favorite is Cadence OrCAD PCB.

 

[Minder]

I use (free) Kicad and found it very good, there are many tutorials and manuals out there for it.
Previously I was using an older version of Orcad and found Kicad pretty comparable.
If you are running XP still, you will need the older build version.
M.

 

[BobK]

Do you want this to make your our PCBs or to have them manufactured? This matters.

The easiest software I have seen and I use for my own PCBs is the free proprietory program from ExpressPCB. You can learn to use this in an hour or so and print your PCB patterns on a laser printer for toner transfer (which I used to use) or on transparencies for photo processes (which I use now). But, if you want your PCBs manufactured, this software will only allow you a choice of one manufacturer because it cannot (will not) produce standard output files.

Bob