Is there any Good PC Board drawing Freeware or Shareware out there?

Back in the day I had some great freeware that could be used to draw printed circuit board layouts and even one that would convert a schematic into a single or double sided pc board layout. Sad to say I don't even know where those 5 1/4" floppies :cool: are anymore and they would not run on my current OS even if I had the disks or a drive to read them.

I've downloaded a couple "Free" Apps only to find that they were nothing to write home about and some were setup to only feed board designs to a web based company to get them made for a hefty fee. I can etch my own boards so that's not at all what I'm looking for.

I can hand draw what I need or fake it on any number of generic drawing programs, but that's a pain compared to what I used to do with those older apps. So, I'm wondering if anyone can point me to a legit no strings attached piece of freeware or shareware for doing pc board layouts.

Thanks in advance for any advice or direction!


PS: OK, so I need to fess up, I think I still have an 8", and a couple 5 1/4" floppy drives in a box in the garage. I just can't get rid of good junk :oops:.

Hi Tom,

As usually there is very few or maybe none offering a "free lunch".
OK - maybe a free lunch but you have to pay double up for the dinner :p
There seems to be some kind of ”limitation” with all of them.

For my own work I use Diptrace. They use the number of PADs and layers
as the limiting factor. Otherwise the program is a full blown version.
For the free version (Non-Profit 500 PADs / 2 layers) – look here.
Should cover most of your needs.

Another alternative is Eagle (never tried).
They have a free version limited to 100mm x 80mm size +++
which very fast become too small for our needs.

And there may be other vendors out there.
Never looked back after start using Diptrace.

Tom,
Rsonline has Designspark,fully blown and FREE.
Les

Thanks!! I'll be trying both this evening.

There is also Kicad. It's free and it runs on Windows, Mac OSX & Linux.

http://www.kicad-pcb.org/display/KIC...Software+Suite