I am using kicad for my pcb design a tut to fit the specs of this fab. house would be nice.
Kicad is soo much nicer than eagle with larger boards more schematics and layers… Free and open source also.
KiCad seems to work fine with BatchPcb, but there are some issues to notice.
Custom rotated(0.1 degree accuracy rotated) components or pads may not work as they show up as triangles in DRC-bot.
It is fixed in the KiCad’s SVN code at SF.net, but not released yet, so the ‘pcbnew.exe’ should be self compiled if user rotated components are used.
If edges are under 8mils thick it must be excluded from copper gerbers with choosing “Exclude Edges_Pcb layer” in the plot dialog.
I think mask clearance should be 0 or 1mils, in default it’s 10mils and seems to make a large unvarnished area around pads.
Also if you use components exported from Eagle there can be a missing copper mask layer in some through hole pads, but it can be still soldered and the export script maybe updated since I have used it.
Actually it’s so fast and easy to do your own components that I rarely try to find ready-made components anymore.
Modifying tracks and also components directly in the board is quite easy and realtime DRC keeps clearances, so there is nothing to worry after setting the initial sizes in the settings.
Drill file is mirrored by y-axis by default, myabe it should be unchecked as I had a note “Wierd drill file, no negative signs” in my order, although drills come fine.
I dont know what happens if there are too small drills as KiCad’s DRC can’t find them and DRC-bot doesn’t seem to complaing.
I must agree that KiCad is the best PCB software for many projects and superior compared to other amateur tools like Eagle.