FOSSPicks

Circuit design

Horizon EDA

One of the many things that once seemed impossible, but is now accessible, is creating your own printed circuit boards (PCBs). You can now prototype and design your own boards from your humble home computer, and there are also now many manufacturers who welcome print runs as small as one. Add to this a crowdsourcing community happy to dive in to add their own orders and support themselves, and home brew PCB design should properly be considered a new cottage industry. The central part of this new ecosystem is open source software that can help you design, arrange, and build a circuit board that will work exactly as you intend it to and print according to your own specifications and requirements. This is the job of an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) package, which is exactly what Horizon EDA happens to be.

Horizon EDA is a comprehensive circuit design and creation tool that bundles several key components (pun intended). The first, and perhaps most important, is called "the pool." This is the parts library that lets you drag and drop predefined and readily available components into your designs. There's a comprehensive editor for adding your own parts, but you're more likely to clone the 35,000 parts database from Horizon's own GitHub repository and use this via the tabbed-by-category pool manager. There's a big difference in the way EDA implements versus other open source tools, because it uses a very flexible hierarchy of JSON-formatted files for each part, tracked by metadata stored in SQLite. It can also only contain real parts with full part numbers you can type into sites like Digikey.com to place an order. This is something you'll appreciate if you've used, for example, the Arduino IDE parts list.

With a new project created, the second key component is the schematic editor. This is where you place components from the pool to design the circuit with the functionality you need. The connections themselves are composed of networks, such as tracks for different voltages and signals. These networks can have their own algorithmically controlled rules, such as clearance, track width, and hole size. These become apparent in the third key component, the board layout preview. This is where your design becomes an actual circuit with components placed on a board. This view can quickly become complicated when it arranges your components and circuits across the various layers and tracks required to take the logical concept into the physical realm. You can even view the final board in exploded OpenGL 3 3D, which is a brilliant educational tool useful for any example boards you might want to download or share.

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