There are many circuit design softwares available to satisfy diversified layout requirement, including free PCB design software, online free PCB design softwares, and industrial PCB softwares. This is the PCB design software list and brief introduction. Do you need a free PCB design software or tool to put in practice the new electronic project you’ve just designed? Is an excellent pcb layout design software tool to create professional printed circuit board ( PCB ). Is an open source (GPL) software for the creation of electronic. ![]() Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • Classifying the free PCB design software packages First of all, lets short them according to their usability and OS platform dependency. • Native apps or single platform: Natives apps are usually designed to run on a single operating system. Like most premium PCB design software are built to run on windows only. • Cross platform apps: A cross platform app runs on many OS platform, including Linux, BSD and macOS. They performs as well as a native app, it’s highly recommended to choose a cross platform software. • Web apps: Web apps could run on almost any OS platform with a descent web browser, including Chrome OS and Android. They have great portability, but lacks the performance compare to native apps, in most cases. Now I’ll short them according to their licencing model. • Free and opensource software: The best choice if you’re going to use a free PCB design software. There’s many of them, just be sure to pick an active project with a large community base. • Free software: They are free to use, without any feature restriction or expire date, still the software source code is not avail. • Limited freeware or crippleware: You can use the software with some limitations, but usually don’t have a expire time. Some of them works on the fremium model. • Trialware: These are most the restricted type of freeware, you can’t use them after certain period of time. Many features are crippled often, I try my best to avoid them. Anyway there’s always some trick to use a trialware after their expire time. Best Free PCB design software So, you should not choose a crippleware or trialware if you’re going to use it in long run without being forced to pay. There’s some opensource PCB design software as good as professional software, you’ve to just find it out. Let’s start exploring them one by one. KiCad Undoubtedly it’s the best free PCB design software till now, fully featured and opensource, backed. KiCad is a truly cross platform and multilingual application, runs seamlessly on Windows, Linux, macOS and most BSD flavors. Till now there’s five main tool in KiCad EDA suite, • The KiCad program is the project manager, takes care of everything else. In this version you will find new opportunities and modifications to the game which were not previously seen and therefore we should install it. You will automatically install the mods if you have installed forge. You can download it via the links above in formats such as.exe and jar as you prefer. To your attention the latest version of Minecraft Forge for the latest and current version of the game Minecraft forge 1.8.9 with this program you can easily install various mod for version 1.8.9, and also play on servers with the latest version of the game. Minecraft forge download. Installation: Download.exe file and just install it in the game folder, the path he needs to find himself. • Eeschema is the schematic drawing tool, can also import schematics from other EDA software. • Pcbnew is the PCB layout designer part, it can also render a 3D model of the final product. • Gerbv is used to view the Gerber files, drill files and export to other formats. • Bitmap2Component, it’s used to create new component footprint, useful when you’re using some custom part. Here’s the official website for more details and installation instruction,. Many opensource hardware project used KiCad to design their PCB. The best part is it’s under heavy development, I hope it will be as good as any premium PCB design suites like Xpedition PCB or Altium Designer within few years. I think the only downside is the user interface, it needs some improvement. The whole package is a bit large too, around 900 MB. Fritzing Fritzing is another opensource multipurpose EDA software, if you like to design with Arduino and breadboards, you’re really going to love it. Fritzng has four different tool set, • A schematic capture tool, you can import almost every component and lots of third party boards to get your schematic ready. • A PCB layout tool to create the PCB, though it’s not very feature rich compared to other counterparts. • A breadboard view tool, that’s really cool, with lots of third party boards to import. • A coding IDE, somewhat similar to the Arduino IDE, you can program an AVR or PICAXE. It’s a cross platform application, runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, the sleek Qt based user interface is quite attractive. Here’s the official website,, you can get more info, tutorial and installation instruction there. Though it’s said to be the EDA software for non-engineers, but it’s much better than others if you want to design some graphics rich circuit diagram for presentation. Eagle PCB design software It’s one of the most popular designer software, used by hobbyists to large corporations, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Eagle is purchased by Autodesk from CadSoft, here’s the, to download the free version. Though Eagle’s free version is limited to only 80 x 100 square mm board size and two layer PCB, but it’s definitely worthy to give it a try. There’s thousands of free online tutorials available about how to get started with eagle. EasyEDA EasyEDA is a web based almost complete free PCB design software, you don’t need to install anything to use it, works well on Chromebooks. Though it’s relatively newer, but gaining popularity fast. Here’s the official website,, there’s also a Chrome extension of EasyEDA. You can do almost everything from schematic capture, PCB layout design, SPICE simulation, gerber file generation and optionally fabricate the PCB from them.
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