Electro-engineers of fedi, what #FOSS software can you recommend for developing #hardware?
Mainly looking for circuit design, but interested in anything.
I don't have fancy needs. I don't need circuit simulation. I DO need a proper component catalog and to be able to wire up two things directly without the thing bitching about overlaps or whatever.
Something forcing me to figure out the geometry of all my connections when defining what is connected to what is worse than useless for me.
@praxeology KiCAD I tried a couple years ago and it had all the problems and essentially no part library bundled and apparently also no official place for people to upload their catalogs. Did that get better?^^
Fritzing I thought was windows-only shareware or something, but apparently there's a package for my OS, so that might be a good tool for me right now. :)
I'm not an EE & haven't touched it in like 15 years, but since you haven't gotten replies yet -- I used to use tkgate, & (depending on your standards for component catalogs) it might meet your needs.
@phryk
If I recall, it was somebody's school project in the late 80s & just kept being maintained up through the early oughts.
Being TK, it might be possible to get native-looking widgets instead of pseudo-motif with a one- or two-line change. I personally appreciate when software looks like my childhood; seems more trustworthy :P
I remember hearing something about modern GPUs removing 2d acceleration in favor of more and better 3d acceleration, so maybe that's what's going on here. Certainly it was not originally developed with 3d acceleration in mind!
(I'm pretty sure I actually used this package on FreeBSD 5.0 in 2005 or 2006, on a pentium 2 or an amd duron with onboard vesa, and got acceptable performance out of it)
@enkiv2 Yeah, I assume it's caused by my current weird setup where I had to actively tell X to use the second (older) card, because the first one doesn't have driver support in the stable release.^^
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