Re: SolidWorks is cool, sort of (but FreeCAD might be better)

On Fri, 20 Jun 2025 09:59:50 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
<tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 19/06/2025 22:21, john larkin wrote:

I barely remember when draftspersons would draw schematics on vellum
and tape PCBs on Mylar. I am too young to remember inked drawings on
starched linen, and inked PCB layouts too.
 
It  was adventurous to run a trace between two pins of a DIP ic.

>
Being old and cantankerous that is exactly how I do my simple PCBs to
this day, except that I use Corel draw and layers.
>
I spent a week trying to get a PCB cad program to work, gave up and did
the PCB in a day.

It would have helped to have someone walk you through it.

>
There is an online website that will convert Corel drawings to the
correct format for PCBs.

I was just a kid running DOS when I learned to use PADS. Now, older
and crankier, I still use PADS. And it will open all the old files.

What's weird is that we did dumb single and double sided boards back
then, with leaded resistors and TO92 transistors and DIP14 ICs. Now
we're doing 8 and 10 layer boards with 500-ball 0.8 mm pitch BGAs,
multiple pour layers, 0306 caps, coplanar waveguides, thousands of
stitching vias. But the old PADS would have done all that just fine.
PCBs really haven't changed. Just the video resolution is better now.

And the PCB houses will still make boards from the same Gerber files.

The advantage of a PCB program, over a drawing program, is that you
can draw a schematic and import it into a PCB and check it and stuff.
And you can have a library of parts, each with a schematic symbol and
a multilayer PCB decal.

Some of our boards have a thousand parts.

Opposite of you, I use PADS as a drawing program. And in ECO mode, I
can just draw a PCB without a netlist or anything.