I can confirm a similar cultural/organisational resistance to admitting you FUBARed something. I'm not sure our spies are any more competent than Russia/China/Korea/India/etc. Actually recent revelations seem to imply a certain sense of unreality, an overconfident, bureaucratic, overtly political and un-scientific juggernaut.
From what I was told, lead-free solder has a large amount of flux in it to make it half-way usable. Unless you're licking your fingers after soldering with leaded solder, you may be doing more damage to your lungs with the lead-free stuff than you're doing to your body with the leaded. But I'd love to see the numbers on this.
I've looked into this, but I'm torn. In my mind the most compelling arguments against lead-free are: of the studies of factory workers who work every day with lead/tin solder, they couldn't find elevated blood lead levels; and that the fluxes in lead-free solders are both more exotic (i.e. less studied for adverse health effects) and a greater proportion of the solder.
The danger of absorbed lead is clear, but it's not a straight line from there to lead-free solder. Furthermore, the process that resulted in the EU (mostly) banning lead solder seems to be based more on the precautionary principle than any evidence of health or environmental damage from solder specifically. Added to that is some definite PR misinformation floating around - it's been hard for me to come to any conclusions.
I believe it contains on the order of twice as much flux, but I can't find a source for that at the moment. So I don't think flux fumes are much more of a concern than with leaded solder (for which you should have good ventilation or a fan). I did have a ball of solder shoot towards me when I was first getting a feel for it, so you definitely need safety glasses, though I understand this can occur with leaded solder as well, and you want to wear glasses anyways to keep clipped leads out of your eyes.
Sorry if I'm missing it, but is there any additional info/source on their stationary implementation? I'd love to implement a smaller, cheaper version with one of Telit's embedded chips.
You know what it would be nice for KiCad to release? Binaries.
I've gotten into several discussions with KiCad users, but it always comes down to me saying "This is marketed as cross-platform, how do I install it on Mac OS?" "Oh I don't know, I just apt-get it."
Well, great. I'm glad EAGLE's got some competition on the Linux side, but seriously, how do I install KiCad on the Mac? The Mac link on the KiCad site, which you would assume would take you to a binary, instead drops you on a github project for a build script that hasn't been updated in six months. This is the point at which my electrical engineer friends give up. The script requires you to manually install a bunch of dependancies, and upload an SSH key to Launchpad.
Ok, well, can I use Homebrew? No, KiCad doesn't release stable versions either, and brew won't accept HEAD-only recipes or whatever they call them.
So, I'm a little at a loss. I'm an actual EE, and I love the /idea/ of KiCad, and I'd love to actually try it, but it seems like you need to be a software engineer just to install this electrical engineering tool. This makes the barrier to entry unacceptably high, and I think works against what they're aiming for. KiCad already has a terrible reputation - every conversation I have about it with KiCad users is along the line of "It's much better now," "It doesn't crash nearly as much," "CERN has a guy working on it full time!" I think they're really shooting themselves in the foot here by not even releasing stable versions. Anyone know what's up with the project?
I've been getting a bit more involved with KiCAD and asked a similar question. The problem is that right now there are no OSX developers and as a result the installer is in terrible shape as well as the stability.
Until they can get that sorted out don't expect anything soon. There have also been quite a few massive changes in the code base that don't appear to be slowing down. They aren't complete though and need a LOT more work. The way it looks I wouldn't expect anything for at least another 8 months+, probably even more than a year.
It is unfortunate, but there are only so many people to work on it.
Well...I completely agree. And in the absence of any progress on binaries in the next few months, we're going to compile and release them on KiCad.info. Still not the answer, of course, but progress.
As for Mac, I've really struggled with this, especially for my course. It's unacceptable to ask someone to buy a new computer for layout, though I normally recommend a virtual machine and an Ubuntu or Windows install (the same a Mac user would have to do to use Altium). That still doesn't get you the latest version but it opens up many more options. I also highly recommend the work of Wayne and Layne on a Mac compile script (again, if you want to do that): http://discuss.wayneandlayne.com/t/experimental-mac-build-fr...
I guess I'm one of those people who tells my friends that KiCAD is "much better now". Bear in mind that this is a comparison to oh, five years ago, when it would crash roughly as often as OrCAD... EEs are accustomed to buggy tools that crash at inopportune moments, so to be clear, I think KiCAD is doing quite well.
I do stick to using it on Windows though. If the situation on the Mac is as bad as you say, perhaps they should drop their OSX claim until that gets fixed.
Even the link to the Windows version drops you in a folder on some random French server[1]. This looks like an exe that some random person built over a year ago. They should consider dropping all mentions of cross-platform compatibility until they're ready to release cross-platform software.
I don't know what you're expecting (nightlies?) but KiCAD is a slow-moving project. Take a look at the old builds folder to get a rough idea of the interval between releases.
And that's not a random French server. KiCAD was originally started by a French researcher, and that's the site it's been distributed from for a long time. Only in the last few years has development shifted to a different location, but we haven't seen a whole lot of outward improvement.
I don't want to sounds like a fanboy; KiCAD clearly needs a lot of work on multiple fronts. But I've used it for moderately complex 2-6 layer projects and it's performed well enough for my purposes. If it's the Free Software angle you're interested in, there's always gEDA (which I have not used extensively).
they should drop their osx claim. i recently (2 months ago) fought kicad every step of the way in trying to get it installed and working on my mac, and i'm super comfortable with the shell and compiling from source and dealing with errors.
eventually i gave up and went to fritzing and got my parts done and sent to the fab in that same amount of time.
I guess the main difference is that walkie-talkies don't connect to your phone, or share text or GPS data. They also don't mesh network (automatically).
It's 2 meter VHF, very low bandwidth. Useful for GPS and text messages only. An Email bridge might be pretty cool, but I'm not sure of the exact speed.
Yes, we're focused, with this first product, on asynchronous, low-bandwidth data comms. Through our R&D for the past 21 months, that's what most testers and people wanted most, especially when they don't have service otherwise.
I'm a little confused about the Final schematic. There are unlabeled wires floating around, and even after reading the whole document I'm confused as to where exactly the EQ modules fit into the design. Can anyone shed some light on how these pieces fit together?
