using kicad

i really don't like graphical design software tbh, i keep wishing it was text based like openscad

@navi that might work for the schematic, not as much the PCB

@icedquinn i'm finishing up the schematic in a moment, then i'll go to the pcb and i can give an opinion on that

though openscad does allow for a lot of flexibility so i'm skeptical to think it can't work

@werdahias @navi kicad functionally works but the UX definitely feels like they fulfilled the grant requirements and left the building.

routing traces is probably the biggest bite against doing it in text. toporouting is relatively solved but people still don't trust the autorouter (and the foss autorouters are ... woozier to get working.)

pikchr (or general constraint programming style) notation could physically place parts, like "usb at 32, 32; cpu 16 south of usb," though the engineers also tend to be loathe to bother filling out the rules for the DRC to make sure *that* doesn't cause problems either.

@werdahias @icedquinn @navi Even in mechanical design, GUIs for parametric CADs are usually way better than doing it in text. You could probably do large assemblies like transmissions and whatnot in OpenSCAD, but the time required to do that is far more than doing it in a GUI. Even with the half-functional assembly and constraint system that FreeCAD has, along with its crash-happy tendencies.

@phnt @werdahias @navi mechanical CAD often is a hybrid of the GUI and text entry, though. GUI doesn't offer as much leverage when a chunk of the job is to precisely copy angle and dimensional constraints off a napkin.

PCBs are very specifically a problem about drawing out 2D vector graphics, though, so the text entry is actively a bad modality for it. you're either typing constraints or point clouds.

kicad's schematic editor is, however, kind of bad, so its understandable to prefer typing out KDL to using it. the graph editor markedly worse than just sketching something out in draw.io instead.

the part kicad is good at is making the final drawings you'd print on a spec sheet and then exporting a netlist, but its ass to prototype with when i used it.

@icedquinn @phnt @werdahias

if it's that painful to do the pcb on text, then i'd want something mixed

type out the schematic in text, then load that in a gui tool to draw traces

@icedquinn @werdahias @navi
>mechanical CAD often is a hybrid of the GUI and text entry, though.

You can do that, but it is not usually how most people would do that. The workflow usually is based on creating parameterized 2D sketches on some plane of the model (either the base planes, or derived planes from surfaces/translations/rotations/...) and then using various actions to build the 3D model from 2D sketches. Text entry doesn't help you there besides setting the parameters. Where text entry is heavily used though, is in model libraries based on standards where the sizing is all a large table with formulas with a premade single model.

@icedquinn @phnt @werdahias

and specially the symbol definition (and probably footprint too): can't really stress enough how painful it was for me to add pins and type in the number and name, and set the type and position, like 50 times

this really should've been some text format, one that i could copy, paste, and bulk-edit in vim in half a second instead of spending like 5~10 minutes clicking through boxes, then typing, then clicking to position

@navi @phnt @werdahias i believe there is a text format for IC boxes and pinouts

@icedquinn @phnt @werdahias oh it's text on disk

okay i'm gonna learn that and never touch that ui again, horrendous