A Review of Some PCB Software Packages
I just went through evaluation of several programs. In particular, I have
several HC11 and HC12 designs I am working on. I looked at several programs.
Protel, ProCad, Ivex, Eagle, and my old standby Protel for DOS (circa 1990).
My goals are a program that runs well on Windows/NT, has a great set of
libaries, and is usable without crashing. I also don't want to deal with
Dongles, so that ruled out several programs that might be worthwhile, like
Tango and Orcad.
I used the Protel Trial version of Protel 98 for a couple of weeks, though I
was severely disappointed by the quality of the software. It seem to crash
constantly, especially when I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing, which
was most of the time. It looked a lot to me like they didn't test the
'non-standard' test cases, where the user did something that the programmers
didn't expect.
On the plus side, Protel's libaries just can't be beat. They have done an
excellent job putting together a world class set of libraries. However, at
nearly $5000.00 for the program, I wasn't impressed enough to lay out the
cash for a program that crashed so often, and had numerous other bugs.
ProCad. Ah, ProCad. I bought ProCad32 Lite for $99.95. The worst $99.95 I
have ever spent. The user interface is extremely poorly constructed.
Everything seems to be referred to as a Database. Parts, Libraries, Boards,
and Schematics. I think I see where they wanted to go with it. They wanted
to setup a way for everything to have a similar command structure. However,
they certainly didn't get there! The documentation was poor, and the
libraries were not laid out very well. It looked promising at first, but
after several GP-Faults, and my basic inability to figure out the program in
the 30 hours I spent trying, I would put this one dead last on my list of
potential candidates.
Ivex (www.ivex.com) puts out WinDraft and WinBoard. You can download a
limited version from their website. I was able to get somewhere on this one.
This one does a decent enough job on allowing you to draw schematics. The
schematic to PCB step is a little clumsy though. You still have to create
netlist files and a like. I was pretty serious about this one for a while.
This is worth a decent look, especially since you can try it out for free.
Eagle is my current 'want to get better at it' program. I really like the
way that the transition from schematic to PCB works. You basically hit a
button, and it works. The autorouter is also pretty good, as it is a rip-up
router. I am impressed by the router. It also does a good job at allowing
you to create 'jobs' for outputting various gerber files. You have to step
through each individual file setup once, but after that you can do multiple
files with a single click. This program has some real potential.
On the down side, Eagle's library management is really poor to the point of
unusable. They have lots of parts, but finding what you want is difficult,
and creating a new part is really painful. It took me quite a while to
figure out how to do it. I still have high hopes that Eagle will work out
for me. I just can't seem to get all the way through a project with it
though.
Last, but not least, is my 1991 DOS based version of Protels Autotrax. I
have both the schematic editor and PCB layout. The user interface on both is
actually quite easy to deal with. On the downside, it is an old clunky DOS
application that requires special drivers for the video cards (mine is not
supported, so I am using VGA), special drivers for printers (HP Laserjet is
one of them), and all the other reasons that we all moved to Windows.
Outputting files is painful, transfering the schematic to the PCB program
requires running auxilary programs, getting an electronic version of your
schematic stinks, and non of my new hardware is supported. It is, however,
what I do most of my PCB work with because it is simple, it works, and never
seems to crash.
Thanks: "Kevin Ross" <kevinro@nwlink.com>
Autotrax was bought by Microcode 
