![]() ![]() The biggest complaint I have about Eagle though isn’t the cost, its’s how unfriendly it is to learn to use.īut, all three of them are difficult to use. This does make them more competitive although many will find the requirement to pay a recurring fee indefinitely to be a big negative for Eagle. Most people developing PCBs independently, like entrepreneurs, hackers, and freelance designers, usually can’t afford to shell out that kind of cash on software.Īlthough significantly cheaper than Altium, OrCad is still really expensive with a price tag of $2,300.Įagle has changed their payment structure to a recurring fee of $60 per month, or you can save a bit by paying annually at $495/year. A good amount of freelancers splurge on Altium because it’s what they already know. Because of that it’s also the package that many new freelance engineers are most familiar. It’s good software, but that’s pretty crazy.Īltium is the most popular PCB design package among those with a company’s budget behind them. Get your FREE Ultimate Guide - How to Develop Your New Electronic Hardware ProductĪltium Designer is considered the Ferrari of PCB design packages and starts at over $7,000! No that is not a typo. Although I’m a biased fan of DipTrace, you’ll learn it’s not the best option for everyone. Instead, I wrote this article to share my own experiences. There are many packages not discussed in this article because I’ve never personally used them. However, for hardware entrepreneurs, startups and makers I prefer a less well-known PCB design packaged called DipTrace.ĭisclaimer: This article is not intended to be an unbiased review of every PCB design package available. That being said, there are three PCB design packages that tend to be the most popular and considered the best: Altium Designer, Eagle, and OrCad. This time I remembered to use DipTrace’s verification routines, and this allowed me to catch some additional problems that had made it through into V2.There are numerous software packages available for designing printed circuit boards (PCBs), too many in fact. After removing a superfluous 2-wire terminal block and moving a couple of parts around, I was able to make the V2 PCB smaller than the original hand-wired model. On this iteration I learned a good bit more about DipTrace’s schematic/component/pattern relationship, so I felt like I was getting at least some value out of my screwups. ![]() So, it was back to the drawing board (literally) for a ‘version 2’ PCB. The pad pattern for the two-wire terminal blocks wasn’t correct (too small), and at least one of them was reversed – oops! In addition, a couple of PCB traces weren’t correct. ![]() First iteration of PCB is slightly largerĪfter inspecting the PCBs, I realized I had screwed up on a couple of items. Size comparison between PCB and hand-wired versions. So, after some more fumbling around, I came up with the following model for the PB1K What I needed was a PCB, so I (or anyone else) could fabricate any number of charging modules without the PITA factor of a hand-wired perf-board implementation, so I decided to see If I could make a PCB using the free version of DipTrace.Īfter fumbling around for a while in DipTrace, I soon realized that in order to do a good job with a PCB design, I needed a component and associated PCB pattern for the Adafruit PowerBoost 1000C, and AFACT, none existed – at least not in a form compatible with DipTrace. This system has worked extremely well, but now I wanted to duplicate it for a planned upgrade to a larger robot platform, and I really wasn’t looking forward to hand-wiring another board. This system worked very well, and with the modifications discussed in this post from last January (January 2017), I had a complete system for autonomous on-board charging. Finished charging module connected to two 2-cell 3.7V battery packs ![]()
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