"I avoided it for years because my company had dedicated people to do layout for us, and from what I saw it was not trivial to learn." - pitts8rh
Same here. The formality of it all is what kept me away from picking it up. Having those folks around actually burned me pretty bad on my first board, I didn't know what I (and they!) didn't know, and I found it weird to be asking / ordering others to do stuff. We had a couple of engineers in our department who took the bull by the horns, I should have too. Though both in college and at work everyone did layout on X terminals, which was an entire clunky ecosystem that I never entirely adapted to (editing config files to get the backspace key to work...).
"Alas, if you had only taken this on a little earlier I could have avoided the Diptrace commercial license upgrade.."
I feel pretty bad about that, though your layouts, dimensions, and interconnect assignments (not to mention actual boards!) have given this project a real leg up, which I really, really appreciate! Both you and Vadim have inspired this old man to learn a few new tricks. It's tough getting it up for new software / whole new fields. You guys are so adventurous!
Having done three fairly trivial boards now, it seems the way to approach layout in KiCad is to get everything arranged and throw down some crap connect, rinse & repeat. KiCad doesn't let you easily rip up a trace one segment at a time (why not?) but it does have a fairly powerful interactive editing mode (Route | Interactive Router Settings... | Mouse drag behavior | Interactive drag) that should be the default because it lets you nudge things to the point where you're actually doing layout from whatever wire bits and pieces you have there. If I hadn't stumbled across that I'd probably still be laying out my first board. KiCad's schematic editor is pretty garbage though, at least 2 steps down from LTSpice if you can imagine that. And since you need a schematic to get into layout, everyone's initial experience is that. If it weren't for on-line tutorials I don't think I'd have had it in me to tackle either KiCad nor OpenSCAD.
I must say too that just laying out an oscillator on pad per hole vector board takes me much of a day to plan out, and several more hours to realize with solder and bus wire, so this isn't all that much extra time, and then it's done for good and it can be trivially replicated. And I guess I'd always rather be pushing a mouse than doing real work.
