Being taken seriously by companies, getting the big investments to increase developement speed by lots. Actually overtaking its competitors in terms of features. A big usability overhaul. Fun stuff like that.
Having worked in the EDA industry, though more on the electronics simulation side, there's a surprising amount of complexity in these tools. I think the complexity is such that it needs more than a single entity supporting it otherwise only the features that CERN directly uses will get enhanced.
Can confirm from the plugin simulation side. Integrations and import/export are important. Drafting by itself is useless to many companies without facilitating the corresponding engineering work.
Agreed! The data challenges are the biggest blocker IMO. It's so hard to know the quality of models even when received directly from manufacturers. Hopefully companies like SnapEDA can help with a lot of it though I think there needs to be some kind of model interchange standard
SnapEDA is a pox upon the industry attempting to be yet another middleman in between you and parts libraries.
Unfortunately, companies like SnapEDA bring negative value to the industry because they produce crappy libraries that you can't trust.
So, they reduce pressure on the parts vendor to produce a decent symbol/model. At the same time, I can't trust the symbol/model until I check it personally and run it through a project. And, finally, some contract terms generally prohibit me from redistributing that symbol (go check the terms you agreed to when you signed up).
I had some really bad issues using vendor supplied (TI even!) and snap parts with misnumbered pins or the wrong width package... and many bad experiences with eagle built in libraries.
I much prefer using a formula based tool to make packages for a specific part's mechanical drawing, I just don't trust what other people have made yet. I'd like to be able to but the trust isn't there yet.
Maybe kicad could list parts as verified against a standard footprint based on user feedback so that I know that whatever random part number actually fits this particular soic wide or whatever bga pattern. Maybe a part number has no notes but it's nice to know that no one has checked it manually yet too. Like the wine database.
That is great and all, but I am an EE student, and last time I looked for an internship, there are a grand total of zero actual serious EE companies that use kicad. It is pretty much all Altium rn (and god I hate using altium). So ye, what I mean by being taken seriously by companies, I am talking about more than one or two companies.
