<p>WinQcad has a series of built in tutorials.&nbsp; It also has a decent autorouter.&nbsp;</p><p>WinQcad has some limitations for extremely large, very complicated boards, so we generally use Eagle for hardware design.&nbsp; However WinQcad is easy to pick up and great for normal hobbyist use.&nbsp;</p>

 

We have a machine here running Altium. I'd personally probably go futz around with that before trying to load something free again. Ugh.

 

Wait a second, are you the guy who does the megasquirt pnp boards? If eagle is good enough for you, I guess I'll stick with it a bit longer.

I think a lot of my problem is being generally ignorant of most of the EE world. I have no EE education and no professional experience. I only just yesterday discovered that a huge portion of parts have industry standard code names. Like 4N33 refers to a specific opto-isolator, and so on.

I guess my initial enthusiasm was similar to the guy who makes his first program that says hello world and he's like "NOW I AM A HACKER, NEXT PROJECT: WRITE A VIDEO GAME." I realized I wasn't there yet, I just didn't realize how much I didn't know. I still don't.

 

I had a technician working for me who specialized in Solidworks. From what I could see the UI was reasonably intuitive and it could do the different things that I thought it should be able to do.

I've used different PCB layout software packages in the 90s and none were anywhere as bad as Allegro.

 

I have used most of the major packages and several of the minor tools. IMO Eagle is the best way to go for a free tool if you don't run into size limitations.

Board houses in general all boil down to the same price if you compare similar products. The OSH park model appears to cater more to the hobbiest. This may give them an edge for your application.

 

Oh and Solidworks is bomb!

 

Pro/E (now Creo) has come a long way...

... to looking how Solidworks did about 10 years ago.