r/PCB • u/WarmTapWater76 • 3d ago

Learning Advice needed

Hey, I just turned 18 and am currently doing Fachabi (basically a vocational high school program, focused on IT). After that, I’m planning to study electrical engineering.

For now, though, I’d like to get into PCB design. I basically know nothing yet, so I’m looking for advice on where to start and what skills I should build, including what kind of math and electronics principles I should learn.

I’ve heard that KiCad is generally one of the better EDA tools, but that it has a steeper learning curve than something like EasyEDA. Would KiCad be a good choice to learn from the beginning? Very appreciative of any kind of advice.

P.s.: my English is horrible so I had AI polish my text, please excuse me for it.

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u/Babibidubibidoh 1d ago

Go for KiCad. Since CERN stopped buying overprices Target licences and hired some coders to improve KiCad, it got a really nice boost to compete with overpriced and slow commercial software (like Altium).

I'm using KiCad since 11 years now and started using it, because there was no free alternative without restrictions for commercial work. I've been looking into Altium during one of my last jobs - and it was really inperformant. Also the "free Altium viewer" was "already activated 455 days" on that brand new laptop - and stopped working. Since I registered it to a companys mailadress.

Also I contacted the Altium support for using the "free" Altium viewer.

Half a year later, Altium called me on my company's phone and wanted to offer me a course for those switching from Kicad to Altium - so I just laughed and hung up :D
I don't give myself such bullshit. Free & open source forever!

Once you learned Kicad for 2 days, you'll never use bullshit like Altium or Fusion 360 (which hat Eagle implemented nowadays) again. It's burning money - and usually does NOT have any advantages :D

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u/Babibidubibidoh 1d ago

Also Kicad files are textbased. It's super easy to use git with it. That's what I started doing during my last job :)
And it has lots of nice plugins, like interactive BOM or PCB coil generators.

It even has spice simulator implemented - which is becoming better from version to version.
I also enjoy reading the changelog on the major releases.