Printed Circuit Design Software for Beginners

[dtengineering]

Thanks, everyone. For now I have installed DipTrace and Eagle (with the sparkfun libraries) in the lab, as well as Fritzing. Fritzing isn't quite ready to do everything I want, but I like how it ties breadboarding in to the process.

So I haven't really made a final decision yet. I'm going to stay away from Altium, or any of the commercial packages, as I do want a package that my students can take away with them and then install in their lab and share with their students in a couple of years when they are teaching in a high school.

And as Jim points out, pens also work great! We actually start our students out by using masking tape and xacto knives to mask the board, then we move on to pens. This semester we're moving on to toner transfer, but will also look at other methods for producing boards.

I hope to take a look at some of the other packages mentioned here over the holidays. There just doesn't seem to be a "perfect" package out there... yet... for introducing people to schematics and PCB production, but with some careful tweaking of libraries it should be possible to get one that will be "good enough".

Thanks!

Jason