Altium is nonfree shittyalternative for kicad by now. Don’t. Especially for hobby.
Comment on How do I get started designing and making and/or acquiring my own pcb?
Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
If I recall, Altium has a free tier, it’s my driver for work, so I use that. As for acquiring a designed board, jlcpcb is a good, inexpensive PCB fab (there are others, but jlc has been surprisingly good for my use)
If you need assembly, too, some do it, it’s not cheap though.
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
basketugly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Okay, I will also spend time here, please let me know any advice for newbies. Thank you for your consideration.
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 22 hours ago
For hobby work altium is quite ridiculous.
I design with Altium professionally every day. It is buggy spaghetti code that they got that way by shoving more and more productivity-centered features in there with little thought.
The libraries are a complete and utter shitshow also, which is why pretty much every company just makes their own.
It works (usually) and you can design fast with it, but for someone lightly using it for hobbies, it is a massive overkill and steep learning curve to not get any benefit over KiCAD in the end unless they want to start doing multichannel complex flex-rigid designs with mechanical linked integration.
Plus for someone wanting to just do a half hour or hour of designing in their free time, the 3-5 minute startup time would also get annoying.