

This was one of the first completely web-based circuit design tools and Upverter’s relative success has been a bellwether for other completely web-based EDA tools such as circuits.io and EasyEDA. Upverter was founded in 2010 as an entirely web-based EDA tool aimed at students, hobbyists, and Open Hardware circuit designers. With that introduction out of the way, let’s get cranking on Upverter.

Fritzing is terrible, and Autotrax is the digital version of the rub-on traces you bought at Radio Shack in 1987. For example, you can do anything you want in KiCad and most of what you want in Eagle. Thirdly, this series of posts serves as a basis of comparison between different tools. Since the reference schematic and board are sufficiently complex for 90% of common PCB design tasks, each of these posts is a quick how-to guide for a specific tool. Secondly, each post in this series is a quick getting started guide for each PCB tool. Already we’ve done Fritzing (thumbs down), KiCad (thumbs up), Eagle (thumbs up), and Protel Autotrax (interesting from a historical perspective). First, each post in this series is effectively a review of a particular tool. There are three reasons why this sort of review is valuable. Every post in this series takes a reference schematic and board, and recreates all the elements in a completely new PCB tool. For the last five months, I’ve been writing a series of posts describing how to build a PCB in every piece of software out there.
