A question for the Framework team, based on my rough knowledge of other companies in the industry.
What CAD package and design software have been used to create Framework products so far? Has the choice of design software been led from what the competition uses, or did you make choices on your own?
TIA
Hi Sam.
This community is mainly for other users like yourself and me. If you have a question for the Framework team, you need to ask them via the support page on their web site.
Hi James, I only asked here because I asked on the discord and was told this is probably a better place to ask the question. If asking directly is a better option, I can ask there though, not a problem.
I think you may find that for PCB work they use KiCAD, and possibly FreeCAD for mechanical drawings.
By trawling through the Github depository you could probably verify my suppositions.
While they use KiCad for some of the smaller modules and stuff, the mainboard PCB schematics they released look nothing like KiCad. And KiCad isn’t really well suited for designing mainboards and other PCBs for a super timing sensitive stuff, memory lanes and so on. It’s simply missing proper bus routing, length matching and impedance calculation features.
I have to disagree.
I would not swarm support with “curiosity” questions, slowing down “real” RMA situations.
A Q&A with the team would be very nice tho!
I didn’t realise that KiCad was missing some of the details you’ve mentioned for proper mainboard design. There was a bit of discussion on the discord about what was used for hardware ex. PCBs, but not much chat about what was used for things like mainboard design. It would be interesting to know that one too. Do you have experience with software or know of any that has capabilities to design assemblies like mainboards?
Really? So they can design high performance boards for the accelerators at CERN (that is where KiCAD originated) but can’t do motherboards etc? I know that KiCAD in its recent versions has length matching etc, and it has certainly had bus routing for a while.
It may be that the company doing the layout and schematics for FW have a long established CAD department that uses another package.
KiCad originated at CERN, but I don’t think CERN used it for all their custom electronics. It was probably just a nice side project and it makes it easy to create prototype boards and stuff. The original CERN version was super limited. KiCad has improved a lot since. But it’s still more suited for smaller PCBs and hobby projects and not for super compact and complicated designs. Like you could do a power supply or a random PCB for an alarm clock or radio or whatever no problem. But doing the length matching and routing for tons of PCIe and memory lanes would be very tedious and you wouldn’t get good results without using external commercial tools.
I both contributed to the KiCad project and used it for PCB creation.