DesignSpark

[Larry Lamb]

I'm also becoming quite a fan of DesignSpark. Can't speak for Laen but I'll give some of my likes and dislikes here:

- Free and I can use it for making money, yippee
- support seems excellent but I've only had one experience of this. Now that was a bug and they fixed it quickly and emailed me a replacement file for the rogue dll. Not bad for free
- creating parts is pretty simple, especially compared to some other packages about.
- multipage schematics, this is a basic feature but I'll list it anyway because my previous favourite didn't support this
- autorouting, drc checks, decent pdf printing, excellent help files. Once you get used to the technology files these are powerful.
- Pretty extensive libraries are supplied although I've ended up using few of them and just making my own - but this isn't painful so its fine.

Haven't got any dislikes really, it works, is very no frills and looks like it will be well maintained.

I've started using it more at work now, we've got Cadstar but for quick turnarounds this is easier to work with and i can use it at home