XNoCAD is a PCB CAD designer software, similar to KiCad, DipTrace, etc
XNoCAD is currently available for Windows only.
To see what's new, see the Releases Page
- On the releases page, for the release of your choice, download the .zip file that starts with XNoCAD.
- Extract this .zip file in a folder of your choice.
- In this folder double click on IDE.exe.
- Optionally, create a Desktop shortcut.
- Use Visual Studio 2022 Community or higher from here
- Make sure you have .NET desktop development workload installed
- Right click on the project with the name IDE and choose Build
- Or, make IDE as startup project and run (F5)
- Exports Gerber and NC Drill files
- Exports BOM, Pick and place files and assembly drawings
- All export is done in one single operation which is called build
- All ERC and DRC is done in a single operation called compile
- You have a solution with different projects
- These projects are various types: Gerber (for manufacturing outputs) and Library
- These projects can depend on one another or can depend on other external libraries
- A library can depend on another library
- All symbols, footprints, components, etc have their own separate file.
- All files are source control friendly, they are XML text.
- External libraries are built and deployed in a similar way is done in software development
- All files mentioned above are like source files
- What gets built is like a binary file ( .dll, .exe, .bin etc)
- Manufacturing outputs work on the same concept of build
- You could have multiple schematics and multiple boards in the same project
- Boards can refer to the same schematic (if you want to have different board layers of the same circuit)
- Schematics
- have multiple sheets
- supports filter selection
- can define net classes
- can define electrical rules for ERC
- can inspect the BOM when the circuit is designed
- Boards
- can mask layers
- can show single layer
- can create layer groups, to show a specific set of layers at a time
- can change a layer color
- can toggle layer visibility
- have 3D preview
- can choose to show/hide parts
- change solder mask color, etc
- can define board rules for DRC
- they work in a similar way as CSS: a rule will be overriden by the one below it
- you can have generic rules and then refine to more specific; you can have very complex rules defined this way
- rules are applied as filtered to items (e.g. trace width) or item pairs (electrical clearance)
- can inspect BOM
- can define the manufacturing outputs
- Gerber and NC Drills
- BOM, can specify the columns and group them
- Assembly drawings and pick and place files
- most of the outputs have a preview
- Footprints
- can be defined manually or using a generator
- have 3D preview
- What's novel to this software is that there is a model (3D) file type
- Models
- can import other file types (.obj, .stl) like in other software
- can define models using simple primitives (cubes, cylinders, etc)
- can define models using generators
- Panelization
- Spice sim
- Advanced routing: diff pairs
- Length matching
- Import from Eagle and KiCad
- Localization