A couple of years ago there was a free blogging service that I used as a kind of public diary. There were thousands of users and multiple thousands of readers.
One day the newspaper that paid for it all decided to pull the plug on us, because we didn’t add enough value to their brand. There were no backups, just some vague promisses.
“Screw you” I thought to myself.
I found out about wordpress and the how to install a webserver on my own PC, and then I learned PHP.
And so I wrote a plugin that could scrape the contents of my online blog and inject it into wordpress.
I learned a lot on the way, not in the least about greed and opportunities.
By the time I finished, the newspaper had found a partner that would save everyones content.
But they failed do so and they dropped the project.
I gave away the plugin to everyone who had started a self-hosted wordpress blog.
Many people moved over to wordpress.com where they could not install their own software.
So I scraped all the content on my own server and gave anyone who asked a wordpress formatted backup of their own content.
EasyEDA is just that kind of service. If the owners pull the plug, all your work is gone.
Sure you can backup your files, but you can’t own the software. It’s all written in javascript.
KiCAD on the other hand is open-source software. You can have the sources and nobody can take it away from you.
Development is paid for by CERN and some other sponsors.
You can, and it’s open source (based on Electron), and JLC provides an off-site desktop version of EasyEDA you can download and run yourself, the autorouter is also offline, no need for their service. It runs inside a offline Chrome container. And you can edit the JavaScript yourself if needed since it’s not a binary distribution. One of the mini-projects I wanted to do was upgrade their offline autorouter to the latest version but that’s too much hassle.
I tried to download this so-called desktop version, but I got the “access denied” error.
But what would be the advantage over KiCad in my case ?
There are pros and cons to both products but the bottom-line is that EasyEDA works best as an online tool and KiCAD is the better desktop tool.
there is no advantage as far as pcb layout. kicad is a better tool. however easyeda will dramatically shorten the overall workflow due to full integration with jlc. and altium is the undisputed professional tool if you do fulltime industrial pcb work.
Yep. You must be a professional. I am not ( anymore ). The topic-starter is not either.
What if he had his initial board made and then decided that the 100 ohms gate-drive resistors might better be 10 ohms ?
He would have to revert to hand-soldering and might regret having his board built by a pick and place machine.
For people like me or him, there is no advantage in streamlining the workflow.
This is wildly off-topic. However that’s the great thing about the PnP service. For the low low price of $20 (or whatever the local currency is) and a Sunday afternoon you can fabricate a brand new board of your own design like the one below with whatever changes you want as simple as replacing the components and submitting a new order. IMO being able to do a “full-stack development” or “soup-to-nuts” as we call it, of a PCB is a lot more valuable than being able to solder a resistor. YMMV of course.
