ExpressPCB CAD software

ExpressPCB is a free CAD software , specially designed to help us to create printed circuit board .
A big plus for ExpressPCB is that this software is free , but after you will test it you will see that ExpressPCB has many minuses .
Evan ExpressPCB is not so user friendly ( we will explain bellow why ) , this software is used by many engineers . If you install ExpressPCB you will see that the software is composed by two subprograms : ExpressPCB and ExpressSCH.

ExpressPCB is the program that will be used to design printed circuits boards and ExpressSCH is a program that can be used do design a circuit diagram ( to draw circuits) .
ExpressSCH is very simple and has few options , and will be a little hard to place components , wire , and edit components name and values . Why ?
The first minus for ExpressSCH is that this circuit editor software don’t have an Auto Annotation option for the drawn circuit , so in this case you need to annotate and place values for all components manually . Another minus for ExpresSCH is that you can not choose the pcb footprints (packages ) for components , to prepare your circuit for the PCB editor .
Another think that I don’t like at ExpressSCH is that you can not generate nets list for ExpressPCB or other printed circuit board editor software .
The ExpressPCB software is a PCB layout editor which can be used to design your circuits , but like ExpressSCH circuit editor ExpressPCB is a little bit hard to use .
Why is a little hard to draw a printed circuit board using ExpressPCB ? It is a little hard to design a printed circuit board , because you need to place manually footprints in the ExpressPCB and you need to check any time the circuit to not make a routing mistake . ExpressPCB don’t have an InterTool communication options and after you link the circuit with pcb , tht software will not place automatically components .
Another bad think of the ExpressPCB is that you can make connection between any components , even the components aren’t connected together in the schematic circuit .
The ExpressPCB printed circuit board editor software can be downloaded for free from the ExpressPCB.com website ( you can follow this link ) . ExpressPCB is available for windows Vista , Seven , XP , 2000 and NT .
To see how ExpressPCB work , we prepared a small video tutorial .
In conclusion : ExpressPCB is not a very nice software (because of poor features ) , but is free and can be a good choice if you don’t want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a paid software .