Best open source and/or free EDA tooling

Kicad. Went from zero to fully working, quite complex digital board with it.

A few tips:

Use ultra librarian for parts when possible. They're usually better.

Making your own footprints is a pain but necessary sometimes. FreeCAD is another OSS tool that also has its rough edges but is good enough. Use the sketcher tool and the datasheet to build up all the lines you'd need (including for cutouts, pads, silkscreen, etc), export as DXF, then import into KiCad's footprint editor. You can then switch layers for each line or use them to position pads such that they're fully accurate and you don't have to think too hard about offsets and whatever.

Find (or make!) a good part manager if you're populating your own boards. I wrote some simple REPL around sqlite in Node.js for working with parts, and have a cheapo barcode scanner from Amazon to work with mouser IDs and the like to "check out" parts as I populate. In hindsight, I wish I had written it in Python. I also use this tool to convert the BOM kicad exports into a more reasonable format for buying. I also subtract away the parts in the DB I already have so I don't keep buying extras of stuff. Just an idea.

Kicad is the best free EDA I've used and I know many others that use it. The active development and large community make it a no-brainer.

I use Altium professionally ($$$) and I feel like Kicad could cover most of the boards I work on. FYI I've seen a few advanced PCB's done in Kicad successfully - just not sure how much manual calculations/work they had to do.

Kicad + the cheap online PCB vendors are a killer combination.

KiCad is by far the best. It is not as powerful as commercial tools: a lot of its high frequency design tools are simple calculators, and so a lot of manual work is required where you would simply set constraints in other packages. It has a neat design rule scripting language which you can use to ensure your requirements are met though. I’ve done a couple boards with frequencies up to the UHF band and don’t think I’d want to go any higher in KiCad. That being said, for simple boards it’s plenty powerful.

There's also https://horizon-eda.org/

If you're sending things to JLCPCB for manufacturing, easyeda.com is useful. I find the editor somewhat annoying, but the component library is huge, and you can easily order PCBs from JLCPCB and components from LCSC. (They're all the same organization.)

I personally prefer KiCAD, but use easyeda.com when I don't have KiCAD around. The new nudge router in KiCAD is pretty nice.

KiCad. It's very stable and offers features that some of the professional programs lack. Extensive part library built-in, and easy to extend. Under active development.

I haven't found a reason to try it yet, but: https://horizon-eda.org/

Or maybe KiCad.

Following. Inventor of OrCAD CIS (Component Information System) here. Still using an old version of Eagle (7.3.0) before it got neutered by Autodesk. I mostly just use schematic capture for documentation, rarely layout an actual pcb, and just use a solderable breadboard for hobby projects. Kicad has been on my list to check out, comments here most appreciated. Didn't know about Horizon, which also sounds worthy.

KiCAD. Routing 10 layer PCB with 2000 pin BGA and LPDDR4 was easy.

Also I desined a fully OSHW FPGA board in KiCAD (RPi style): https://github.com/Fabmicro-LLC/Karnix_ASB-254

I recently did my first pcb in kicad and it was breeze. Not a single crash. It even has 3d view. Is in ubuntu repo. Manufactured PCB at jlcpcb and received 5 boards in 16 days for $4.10

For any of you data folks out there:

In this context EDA is Electronic Design Automation, not Exploratory Data Analysis

Kicad is by far the best and most feature complete. I've used it to make dozens of boards.

Autodesk EAGLE (formerly CadSoft) has a free tier (EAGLE Free) and it's a pretty decent layout program! I made numerous layouts with the standard license when it was still owend by Cadsoft and I found it comparably easy to use. I found a lot of the EDA software had either a very steep learning curve at the start or catered to "professional" workflows such as having different persons that do the schematic and layout that don't matter to me at home. For example, Eagle offered forward-and-backward connection between schematic and layout for a long time, whereas Kicad didn't. Meaning if I made a change in the schematic, I had to jump through hoops to get a netlist change into my schematic. EAGLE was much more focused on the workflow of one person doing the schematic and layout, I felt. Much closer to "getting the PCB layout done", with an easy parts editor to create custom parts etc. The flipside is that it breaks down quickly when you have more than 2 layers, I think. I don't remember any easy tools to e.g. route waveguides or equalize pairs of differential tracks.

But these days, give Kicad a try. Since CERN poured resources into it, it became a very capable EDA tool.

Anyone got any recommendations for FOSS Generative Design instead of F360.

Aside from KiCad you can also look at EasyEda (think it’s from jlc), I’m still using diptrace (haven’t migrated to kiCad yet :$)

There is also LibrePCB: https://librepcb.org/

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/wiki/software

Kicad, by a mile. I use Allegro professionally and would drop it for Kicad in a heartbeat if I could convince my employer to make the switch.

Its kicad

I've been curious to check out https://www.flux.ai/, but haven't played with it much yet.

damn acronyms. I was genuinely excited to learn about more Exploratory Data Analysis tools.