I will be trying to make a cape for BeagleBone Black in the near future. Anyone have experience with layout tools or PCB manufacturers they’d like to share? I am experienced with Cadence from a prior life, but am hoping for something that isn’t so crazy expensive 
Anyone have experience with PCB manufacturers that do pick-and-place? How hard was it to incorporate the fab’s library into the layout tool?
I use KiCad 4. It’s not intuitive, but quite productive to use once you know how to use it. It’s open source and is being developed by CERN.
There’s a community forum and a series of great tutorials (unfortunately in no particular order).
There’s also LibrePCB that is being developed by @urban, but as far as I know it’s not production ready yet, right?
I ordered both at FusionPCB and DirtyPCB. The former has good quality and fast production, but shipping to Switzerland costs 29$. The quality of the latter is less good but still definitely good enough, and it has free shipping (takes a few weeks though).
They’re both pretty simple to use, you export the Gerber files and upload them to the website of the PCB service. As far as I know, neither of them supports pick & place.
DirtyPCB
FusionPCB
Right, creating layouts is not yet possible…
@axel I use Eagle. In my opinion it’s more intuitive and easier to learn than KiCad, but it’s commercial and has some limits in the free version (if there is still a free version, I’m not sure).
Ok thanks! I will give them both a try.
