Fortunately with a bit of work, the footprint libraries can be made to reside local to ones own hardware. Us ancient engineers that are older than dirt find this to be a bit dangerous. KiCad wants to store them in the cloud using version control. The main issue is the way the eda packages store the device footprints. There are a number of scripts that can convert eagle files to KiCad. A bonus is that all the files are plain text, although not particularly well documented.
I think KiCad is quite usable, but it's a bit like early Linux - quite capable but has some rough edges. I wonder how long Autodesk will support an open file format. If you do have problems, Lachlan is happy to look at issues raised on the repository.īy chance I was just working on my own conversion tool, but it requires Eagle files stored in the XML format. There are a few gotchas, of course it is user written not a "professional quality" tool. Lachlan's scripts are pretty good, it is worth carefully reading through the instructions. I guess Autodesk might not understand the special niche Eagle occupies in the hobby/small user market, I think Eagle is almost a de facto standard? However I expect there is a VP Marketing who has made a rule "all products are subscription model only". They could have offered the option of subscription model, and if they can demonstrate there are advantages then people will move over. Personally I think that is misguided, particularly as they seem to be addressing the "Maker" segment, but hey it's their business. I guess from a bean-counters view, if a customer is not actually generating annual revenue then it is not a problem to lose them. It seems that Autodesk have handled it rather badly, going back on promises, and giving a "take it or leave it" choice.
0 kommentar(er)
