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A comment on Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool. Parent comment

Re:Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool by crispyambulance on Monday May 02, 2022 @01:17PM (#31237974)
Yes, KiCAD is the best if you're a beginner, want something free, and actually intend to go through the (considerable) effort of designing a PCB and have it fabricated for real. You can do complex designs and take advantage of really nice features and rule-checks. It's very much an 80% solution to a hard problem and more than enough for hobbyists.

For paid/non-free, some of Altium's offerings would be the next step up, along with Fusion-360. I haven't tried Fusion-360 ECAD. I do know that Autodesk bought Eagle, but it's not clear to me if Fusion-360 is using Eagle for schematic capture and PCB?

After that, it's big-boy tools like mentor or cadence. These are overkill for hobbyists unless the man is paying for your seat.

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Re:Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool by larsrc on Monday May 02, 2022 @05:21PM (#31241094)
As a rank beginner, I was able to use Fritzing to design and get printed a simple board (~10 elements) with little effort. Yes, for anything more complex I would want to invest the time in learning a more powerful tool, but KICAD is more the next step than "the best if you're a beginner".
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Re:Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool by userbinator on Monday May 02, 2022 @09:26PM (#31243245)
After that, it's big-boy tools like mentor or cadence. These are overkill for hobbyists unless the man is paying for your seat.

I've heard that the really expensive EDA tools are like Adobe Photoshop --- everyone experimenting/learning tends to just pirate them, and then end up at a company which does pay for them.

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Re:Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool by dymk on Monday May 02, 2022 @03:14PM (#31239514)
Fusion 360 can import the 3D model of a populated PCB from Eagle, but has no EDA capabilities on its own.
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Re:Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool by OJFord on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @05:54AM (#31246468)
That's not true.

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/electronics-eng...

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/features

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Re:Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool by crispyambulance on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @09:10AM (#31247821)
Yeah, it looks really tempting to have seamless electronics/PCB + mechanical CAD tool. I was wondering if anyone had some experience they could share with producing PCB's using the Fusion-360 toolchain.

I've used it for mechanical and I found it extremely polished and intuitive and totally worth the subscription for that alone, but I have neither the time nor project (yet) to go down the rabbit hole of learning the ECAD functions of Fusion-360.

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