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PCBWeb – Free PCB Design software – first impressions
July 1, 2015Ragnar Ranøyen HombFirst Impressions – Software
PCBWeb is a free PCB-design software. But since it’s free, what is the catch? Read on to find out what our first impressions are after testing out this package:)
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Download and Install
Downloading was as simple as you might expect. No need to register first. Note: it’s only available for Windows.
The installation went smooth. If you miss things such as .NET, the installation package takes care of that, of course. No hiccups there.
To start the program you need to register, but everything is possible to do from the software.
To test this package we decided to make a supersimple LED-blinking board with an AVR. Including both components that needed to be custom designed, and components from a standard library.
Library
Windows_7_Altium
The library editor is simple, yet it has several neat features, such as auto placement of 1-, 2- or 4-row components. It is not as powerful as library editors such as the one you find in Altium Designer, but I think they have mixed both easy to use and powerful features in a rather nice way here. In the library editor it’s the footprint section that is the most challenging to use. It does not include any IPC compliant footprint generator or things that can make the work easier for you. But if you know how your footprint should look, or you find a similar footprint in the database, everything will work out fine.
So all in all it is rather simple to use. It’s possible to create the stuff you need, but not much more than that.
Schematic
Schematic layout is simple, yet powerful enough for most of the standard “Maker”-projects.
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