I just wanted to give everyone my impressions of "QCAD" (it was mentioned a
few weeks ago) - I've played around with the demo for the past two weeks and
I've got a few comments to make on it.

1.  It does exactly what I want it to do for quick and easy PIC Designs
(where I don't want to spend a lot of time doing a schematic capture).  The
interface is drop the component and then indicate what it is wired to.

2.  OR you can take the netlist out of your favourite schematic capture tool
and drop the components down.  It seems to take all the popular netlist
formats.

3.  Cost is $99 USD (Payable on the 'net) for 700 Pins, $195 for 1,000 and
so on.  There is a free demo you can download which will do 700 pins.  It
seems to be the 700 pin version with data output disabled.

The bad stuff:

1.  The user interface is not terifically intuitive or useful in many cases.
I ended up going to the software generated netlist to change things (because
it was easier than using the layout interface).

The user interface is also a bit bizarre.  If it were ported to a Windows
Interface with "Standard" mouse movement, it would be a lot better.

I was never able to figure out how to hand route traces.

2.  The autorouter is no where as good as it is advertised.  This is
exacerbated by the poor component libraries (see 3.).

The example given looks complex and does autoroute very quickly...  BUT any
time I tried a design I had to:  1.  move components around,  2.  expand the
board size.  I found that I got better with figuring out where to place
components for better routing and this improved the time required.

My design point was for simple PIC boards with two connectors and a few
discretes was no vias.

I found that if I didn't get a route with no vias in less than a minute, I
never would.

Something that really surprised me was, moving components by small amounts
(say 0.010") for better component-to-component clearance could cause big
problems with the autoroute (even if I made sure there was lots of room for
the traces that were around the component to go around).

3.  An advertising point was that the software came with complete component
package libraries.  This is a big lie.  I found that I had to edit the
libraries considerably to get traces to go in between pins (both for PTH and
SMT).

As well, for many simple components (ie "D-Shell" Connectors), I had to make
up the libraries myself.

4.  There is no documentation.  There is a FAQ package, but it is worse than
useless.  The only way you're going to learn about QCAD is if you play
around with it yourself (maybe somebody can explain to me how to route
traces manually).

5.  There is a phone number here in Toronto for support.  I wasn't
impressed.  The support is the guy who wrote it and his english is very
poor.  He really wasn't interested in explaining how to use the program and
talk about the gerber output (which I consider to be very important).

6.  The quality of the routed traces isn't that great.  To be fair, I
haven't let it run for eight hours to see what comes out.  But, I have let
it run for an hour without any improvements.


So, while it works in a manner that I would like for my simple designs, it
doesn't jump out at me enough to drop $140 Canadian.

myke

>   Hi All PICers !
>
> I use OrCad since 198?, now I use orcad SDT386+ (DOS) and
>sometimes OrCad Capture for Windows (6.0).
>
> OrCad is  execlent! But I not use the PCB package - for
>this I use Master Designer (P-CAD) /4.5 and 8.5 version/
> Its very easy to generate pcadnlt-format netlist from
>OrCad and then use p-cad's router and pcb-editor (pccards).
>
>
>   Best Wishes, Alex Torres.
>   Kharkov, Ukraine, exUSSR.
>   E-Mail To : altor@cook.kharkov.ua   via InterNet
>               or 2:461/28             via FidoNet
>
>--- GoldED 2.50.A0531+
>
>

"If at first you don't succeed, then maybe sky diving isn't the sport for
you" - Steve Smith