Printed Circuit Board - Parts

[oly]

I have been trying to design a PCB using freecad, I have created a board and some holes and created a few extra models to act as parts.

How do you go about adding parts to your pcb and positioning them ? I am using freecad 0.18 currently are there any good tutorials most I have found seem to be targeted at importing from eagle and not starting from scratch ?

[openBrain]

Maybe you can look here

[freedman]

The normal process of design is to make a crude 3D model like you are doing, export just the PCB to a PCB layout program as a DXF. After the PCB is designed the PCB program typically has an exporter to allow an updated 3D model to be imported back into FreeCAD.

How do you go about adding parts to your pcb and positioning them ?

If you right click on a Body you can use Transform to move the components.

When I did what your doing; draw PCB on XY and pad negative. Draw all your parts on the XY plane on the positive. If you want parts to group/move together, put them on a datum plane attached to the XY plane and then move the datum plane.

[oly]

I actually figured out you can use assembly to position, which is quite nice as you can drag into place and they auto sit on the board.

Need to figure out how I add in the traces now, I am assuming that will be another sketch ?

or perhaps this is where I need to export to kicad as mentioned by others, I quite like the current flow as some of the components are quite large so this gives me an idea os spacing and positioning before I try and connect everything.

Is it possible to the whole circuit in freecad or is this not really recommended ?

[easyw-fc]

I actually figured out you can use assembly to position, which is quite nice as you can drag into place and they auto sit on the board.

Need to figure out how I add in the traces now, I am assuming that will be another sketch ?

or perhaps this is where I need to export to kicad as mentioned by others, I quite like the current flow as some of the components are quite large so this gives me an idea os spacing and positioning before I try and connect everything.

Is it possible to the whole circuit in freecad or is this not really recommended ?

if you are with kicad, you can have a try with kicad stepup
it can be used to ecad/mcad collaboration
and here the kicad StepUp cheat sheet
about the tracks and other stuff, I would absolutely avoid to develop it in FC, just use kicad.

[freedman]

I don't know KiCAD, but there is a low priced program "DipTrace". I like the way they structure pricing, you can get a starter package for $75. A full PCB layout program for $75, that is pretty cool. If you want to do more complex boards then you pay more. I used it for a few boards, works good, it made me some money.

You definitely don't want to do circuit board in a mechanical design program. Circuit board programs have so many cool features, too many to list.

[Scorpio]

Hallo
I think better is to try AUTOTRAX DEX, I use it with very complex schemes and boards for few years. Yes, there are still some small bugs, but possibilities of this soft is amazing.
And price... about 50 USD per yearly upgrades (but licence is lifetime, for any number of PC etc.).
No limits of board complexity, dimensions etc.
Please try, You can do it even for free with functional version.
Regards

[drmacro]

The combination of FreeCAD and the KiCAD Stepup workbench works really slick.

[M4x]

You should use KiCad StepUp, it's absolutely awesome!

[Bance]

One of the things I really like about Kicad/Freecad is the fixed budget, let me just work it out per year = $0(£0)