Trying out KiCAD
Introduction
Teardrops in KiCAD
We, at Elphel, are currently using proprietary software for schematic and PCB development and thus are not able to provide our customers with the “real” source files of our designs – pdf and gerber files only. Being free software and open hardware oriented company we would like to replace this software with open source analogues but were not able to accomplish this due to various limitations and inconveniences in design work-flow. We follow the progress in such projects as gEDA and KiCAD and made another attempt to use one them in our work. KiCAD seems to be the most promising design suite considering recent CERN contribution and active community support. I tried to design a simple element, a flexible printed circuit cable, using KiCAD and found out that the PCB design program lacks such useful feature as teardrops.