On Wed, 25 Jun 2014 18:00:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 6/16/2014 9:01 AM, Rich Webb wrote:
On Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:03:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

I am starting a design with Kicad in order to learn it. The Kicad web
site has a list of Tutorials, but the first one, "Official KiCad
tutorial" doesn't load. Anyone know what is wrong with it?

There are a few that could claim to be the official site. The tutorial
links from
http://www.kicad-pcb.org/display/KICAD/KiCad+EDA+Software+Suite seem
to work okay.

Not working for me. I get 502 bad gateway error. Every page at that
site I try. I was able view pages there a few days ago.

It's a volunteer-hosted site (open source, what can you do?) that has
had issues like that in the past. Seems okay this morning from here,
though.

There is a wiki at http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Kicad and also a
discussion group over at
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/kicad-users/info which is,
unfortunately, hosted on Yahoo. The "neo" group interface on Yahoo is
awful.

I often use a tool and then don't use it again for months. So I need as
much handled for me without requiring memorization of steps as possible.

It's reasonably intuitive as compared to, say, EAGLE. ;-)
The help files are pretty comprehensive.

I'm used to using FreePCB and Orcad, but Orcad is commercial and
FreePCB seems rather stagnant at this point. I saw a video showing
trace pushing in KiCad which would be nice to use on tight boards.

You'll need to grab one of the recent builds for push routing; I'm
running 4680 which does have "push & shove" (under Edit | Interactive
Router) so I assume all of the later ones have it as well.

There are pre-compiled builds at http://escalalibre.com/edwt/ and I
assume there will be another official stable build this summer.

Also, be aware that the much loved Freerouting.net has succumbed to a
takedown notice. IP dispute with the author's former employer.