12 ms·

KiCad 7.0

433 points by randomskk 4y ago

cdcarter 4y ago
A built in command line interface for exporting BOMs/netlists/gerbers is incredible. It's probably not going to be as powerful as Ki-Bot at first, but I'm going to try and integrate it into my GitHub actions asap. And, the new dragging behavior is obviously what we should have had from the start. Going to make doing quick drawings much easier.
- anujdeshpande 4y ago
  Yes! Pretty psyched about the `kicad-cli`. Software CI/CD feels miles ahead of of hardware CI/CD - stuff like this is awesome for pushing forward on that front
- sschueller 4y ago
  I am using this feature to auto test and build gerbers for jlcpcp as well as ibom via gitlab ci for all my pcb projects. Very cool.
- _fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
  Is there a good guide how to use git with kicad? Right now I just copy folders with version numbers. Using it in github sounds like a neat way. Which files should be in my gitignore?
  - blutack 4y ago
    KiBot [0] is super handy for this, the documentation has an explicit section on CI/CD usage. It does have to basically script drive the GUI to achieve some functionality which has now been added to the kicad cli, so hopefully going forward CI/CD with KiCad will be even easier! 0: https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot
  - mastax 4y ago
    I use cadlab which is a PCB CAD specific Git host. It's okay. Visual diffs and such. My gitignores don't have anything special. They ignore the *-bak files that kicad makes. Now that kicad has a stable sort order for its files the diffs are pretty clean and git works pretty well.
sleepytimetea 4y ago
Kicad is excellent - I found 6.0 to be much improved and more useable than the version I had previously. I just downloaded 7.0 and it already is a LOT snappier and happier with loading the symbol libraries. I need to check if there have been any improvements in the auto-router integrations - it was pretty rough the last time I tried it out.
- bpye 4y ago
  I guess it depends what you're doing. I haven't tried the autorouter, but I've found the push and shove routing is pretty good.
SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
This feels like a major step forward, not for the software itself (although it probably is) but for the release schedule. KiCad 5 came out in 2018. KiCad 6 was long delayed and waterfalled and did not come out until late 2021/early 2022. And now only a year later we see KiCad 7. Seems like release engineering is coming more on lockdown which is super great news!
- inamberclad 4y ago
  The forced workflow is a feature IMO. In a production engineering scenario, it's very helpful to have tools that enforce some level of best practice. Especially since the time and money to rework incorrectly designed circuit boards can prohibitive.
- cushychicken 4y ago
  Pretty sure Kicad Services Corp is a big factor in the tighter release cadence. Seth Hillibrand and co have done the best job of “Red Hatting” Kicad and becoming a professional services org that supports Kicad users for a fee. Also helps them guide and drive development of wanted features. I’m convinced there’s no way ODBC support would have happened without it. That’s a feature no hobbyist or maker would care about- it’s specifically geared towards people who collaborate with other engineers and component sourcing departments.
  - delfinom 4y ago
    Not to diminsh KSC as Seth and Wayne are trying to expand things here and there. But ODBC support was by Jon Evans (https://www.kicad.org/blog/2022/12/Development-Highlight-December-Edition-features-coming-to-KiCad-7/#_database_libraries https://www.kicad.org/blog/2022/12/Development-Highlight-Dec...), who is a lead developer but not employed by KSC. He works elsewhere and added it for his own benefit and that of his buddies elsewhere. The tighter release schedule is something everyone wanted, just because v6 got too unwieldy.
    - cushychicken 4y ago
      Bless Jon Evans, then. That feature was a big roadblock to wider pro usage, IMO.
gaudat 4y ago
>Custom Fonts Hell yeah. Finally schematics and PCBs with aesthetic text.
- realjhol 4y ago
  Comic Sans!
- amelius 4y ago
  Does it also support custom SVG paths?
  - jccooper 4y ago
    Yep. You can slap a logo on there pretty easily.
- myself248 4y ago
  Ooooo, this also means if I can get my logo glyph as a font, I can resize it! Putting a logo on a board as a footprint is fine, but footprints, for good reason, cannot be arbitrarily resized.
hales 4y ago
> Pack & Move Footprint Tool This is the biggest usability improvement on the list. Computers are good at menial sorting, humans hate it. For those not in the know: your nice, organised schematic gets turned into a randomly assorted pile of parts when you first open the PCB editor. Now imagine your board has over a hundred parts, including lots of duplicated copy+pasted bits. My workarounds have been to: 1. Number the parts with special codes/prefixes to make manual untangling and grouping faster. 2. Import parts into the PCB editor as a draw the schematic. It's annoying extra work (the schematic undergoes lots of changes) and requires you to assign valid footprints from the start (so your work is constantly interrupted by having to draw missing ones OR your assign invalid ones and forget to fix them later).
- aix1 4y ago
  When choosing how to lay out footprints during packing, does KiCad take into account electrical connections between them? (This does sound like an extremely useful feature either way, but I'm curious.)
  - junon 4y ago
    It appears to now, yes. It didn't before. One of the bigger headaches (for me, as a beginner) was when you had bypass capacitors that need to be physically as close to an IC as possible. However, the two pins go to a voltage source and ground. According to Kicad, those could be placed anywhere on the board, and have no direct relation to the IC itself. This meant you had to carefully find each capacitor by its reference and move it to where it needed to be - often it was packed somewhere completely irrelevant. Now it appears to be much simpler since you can select the components from the schematic and pack them together in the PCB editor, saving a lot of time.
    - unxdfa 4y ago
      Trick is to print the schematic out, draw red circle around each "decoupling environment" and then group them on the board like that. Then place the connectors where the mechanical design demands them and move the groups where they need to go. Then do the signal paths, then the power routing, then the ground fill. Kicad doesn't make that particularly easy but one of the big errors people make is at schematic capture stage where people chuck all the decoupling capacitors in their own sheet or separate net all across the power bus. They belong next to the devices you are decoupling on the schematic. Canonical good example from the HP 3478A service manual: https://imgur.com/LQiAKtI https://imgur.com/LQiAKtI
bbayer 4y ago
I want to learn PCB design, mostly with ARM and ESP based designs. How would I learn basics? I know theory part but I really couldn't figure out why they determine which component and which value they have to use. I mean there are resistors, capacitors all over the place but I really want to learn reason behind it. Also I guess there are some basics related power, battery, UART, USB etc. Is there any source that covers all of these concepts?
- tkuraku 4y ago
  Read the datasheets. They usually have recommended layouts and configurations.
  - Gracana 4y ago
    Yes, this is the way. Datasheets and application notes will tell you nearly everything you need to know. If you don’t understand why something is done or how something works, look it up at that point. Starting from fundamentals is going to be a much slower path than just following manufacturer examples.
- connicpu 4y ago
  For designing with basic components I recommend starting with microcontrollers on a breadboard. There's plenty of great youtube channels that talk about this stuff as well, like GreatScott and Ben Eater
- qiqitori 4y ago
  There are certain usage patterns that you will find all over the place, e.g.: - Current-limiting resistors - The resistor divider (two resistors between e.g. 3.3V and GND. The point between the two resistors will be between 3.3V and 0V, depending on the resistor values. Sometimes you need a certain voltage. For example to bias transistors. - Delays, using a resistor and a capacitor. The values will determine the delay. - Capacitors next to oscillators - Filters, using a resistor and a capacitor. The order and the values will determine the cutoff frequency. - Most capacitors on a PCB probably sit right next to a chip. Often, at least one per chip. They get rid of noise already on the line, and act as short-term energy storage for the chip next to it. - Decoupling capacitors to get rid of the DC component of a signal (i.e. if there is a signal fluctuating between 4.5V and 5.5V before the cap, it'll be -0.5V and 0.5V behind the cap. Often, you need to add a DC component and later remove it, so that's two capacitors already.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I took the time to learn KiCad and I am glad I did. Not being familiar with comparable tools like Eagle, it was very non-intuitive to me. I resisted what I think of as a kind of forced workflow with tools like these. My sense though is that it is kind of the way the industry just is with perhaps CAD packages in general and with electronic/PCB CAD tools specifically.
robomartin 4y ago
We said goodbye to Altium Designer when KiCad 6.0 was released. Altium’s focus and resources shifted towards trying to turn AD into a cloud-based tool. As a result the software people actually wanted to use suffered. Every release introduced a plethora of new bugs. Nobody really cared for cloud EDA. Altium thought they would be able to sell the company to Autodesk. This almost happened. In the end that did not happen. KiCad 6.0 easily covered 95% of PCB design needs, if not 98%. With 7.0 things are better yet. At this point, I can’t see people paying thousands of dollars per year for maintenance on tools like AD. It makes no sense at all.
- fest 4y ago
  > It makes no sense at all. Don't underestimate the inertia of processes at established companies. If a company maintains a part library, if the company has more than a few EEs- it can be a multi-man-month effort with potential for costly mistakes. I like KiCad very much, I use it professionally but I also was the one that mandated AD to be the tool everyone at $WORK must use for production designs a few years ago- solely because it was the common denominator CAD that all EEs at the company/time knew to some degree. The cost of having production designs in a mixture of CAD tools was definitely larger than a few Altium licenses. Now, if that was a new/my own company, I would mandate KiCad or GTFO.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    Absolutely, a couple years ago KiCad wasn't ready for production use, even just a day a month of hitting some obscure issue would have paid for the AD licences, never mind the better part libraries etc. Now of course you'll need the AD licences to work on old designs anyways so it's tricky to transition. Over the weekend I put together a toy project with a few ICs and maybe a dozen passives in KiCad and I was amazed to see how easy everything was. And now with a new release they're probably fixing things I hadn't even been annoyed by yet. Hopefully having an open codebase means we start seeing some nice autoplacement and autorouting trickle in from hobbyists and academia, like we've seen in the 3D printer slicers world.
    - 4y ago
sircastor 4y ago
I just got used to using KiCad 6!! I'm absolutely delighted that KiCad is as usable and continues to be developed on. I remember a time not too long ago where the Mac version was tragically unmaintained. I now do all my EDA in KiCad. I'm not a professional EE. All my stuff is hobbiest, and relatively amateur, but it's so nice to have tools that are so flexible.
- delfinom 4y ago
  >I just got used to using KiCad 6!! Then you'll be just fine, we didn't rock the boat on interface/interaction like 5->6 was.
cushychicken 4y ago
So excited for Pack and Move and ODBC support
childintime 4y ago
Related: https://horizon-eda.org/ https://horizon-eda.org/
- OJFord 4y ago
  ? I suppose strictly speaking yes it's related, but this is like saying 'related: https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/ https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/' on a post titled 'Android 15.0'.
IshKebab 4y ago
I would highly recommend checking out Horizon EDA if you find Kicad to be as awful as I do usability wise. It obviously doesn't have the gazillion features Kicad does (though it does use the core layout editor from Kicad) so if you need those then maybe use Kicad. But if you're just doing "normal" PCBs (4 layer, no RF) then it's much much easier to use.
- twarge 4y ago
  Same here. Highly recommend Horizon for its library management and overall excellent code quality. It is far superior to kicad for everything I do.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I dunno, most PCBs programs I've tried can be summed up to "every single one has weird workflow and you just need to pick one and get used to it"
  - delfinom 4y ago
    Seriously, as a kicad dev this is a neverending nightmare of subjective complaining. There was even an old-timer going on a rampage recently on the kicad forums about how PADS was the most superior EDA tool in the world, why aren't we a clone of PADS?? Basically the CAD world is exactly like people arguing over vim vs emacs
    - ilyt 4y ago
      I mean it is possible to define "bad", but it would be something like "the common actions take too many keypresses". And that's about it, which isn't really a problem KiCad has anyway. Even default keybindings are very personal. Some prefer to focus most of the common ones in one place (say around the qwer/asdf/zxcv cluster) so you don't need to move hand much, while others would rather go by easier to remember names and have [M]ove and [D]rag. I guess you can still define the "bad" here by neither intuitive nor convenient, which is to say "LTSpice", but most programs are not that.
    - 4y ago
junon 4y ago
Holy cow, this is a quality of life update for the record books. The new symbol dragging, footprint pack & move functionality and the custom fonts are absolutely killer. Amazing work here.
ArcMex 4y ago
I have been looking for something like this for a while. So, thanks for sharing.
bmitc 4y ago
Interesting timing. Just yesterday I downloaded KiCad and CircuitMaker. I want to start documenting a circuit design, mainly piecing together schematics from application notes. Does anyone have any suggestions on any other options or what was selected among the options?
- bogantech 4y ago
  As someone who has used CircuitMaker a lot id say don't even bother with it and use KiCad instead. Since KiCad v6 I can't think of anything CM does better, on top of that the CM forums are full of spam and it seems obvious that Altium have effectively abandoned it. I switched when KiCad 6 came out and haven't looked back - I can have as many custom parts I want and I don't need to upload my design to the cloud to generate gerbers, I also don't miss the characteristic exception errors that CM would throw all the time
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. I'll give KiCad a whirl then.
dmoreno 4y ago
Just donated 15€! Thanks Kicad team!
- awjlogan 4y ago
  If you're in Europe, then order your PCBs from Aisler (no affliation). They are a sponsor of KiCad, and you can add a small donation on each order. Direct upload of KiCad files, good turnaround time, and decent prices.
bootloop 4y ago
I always used EAGLE for my PCB work in the past but just recently I started a new project, after many years not touching any PCB design, for which I need to make a PCB and gave KiCad a go. Most of the things work fine but the managing of part libraries I found extremely confusing and not really intuitive: e.g. different library file formats for schematics and footprints or the standard libraries being located and hidden behind some PATH variables.. Regardless, I think it is a great piece of software and I am looking forward to make more use of it in the future!
- c0nsumer 4y ago
  I'm in the same situation. Did a bunch of stuff with (legal, not cheap) EAGLE in the past. But for my next projects (whenever they come around) I'm planning on KiCad because it's so much more mature now.
achr2 4y ago
Some truly impressive quality of life improvements!
smcleod 4y ago
I long for the day that there is modern, easy to use Open Source CAD application for designing / modelling for 3D printing. FreeCAD exists and while I'm sure it's powerful - it's very clunky to use as the learning curve is quite high for someone that occasionally wants to adjust a model. It it certainly seems like KiCAD is filling that spot for the 2D / electronics side of things. Blender is probably fantastic for modelling - but it's not well setup for engineering / printing.
- mtreis86 4y ago
  I've used blender for engineering/printing. It works fairly well, you just have to set the precision to a small enough number that things pull within tolerance. There are a couple decent tool path / CAM plugins too, so it can be used for the full stack and not just making the model, so long as the gcode it spits out is compatible.
- cybrjoe 4y ago
  As a programmer there's something that really clicks in OpenSCAD for me. I've made a few designs that are super easy to adjust/repurpose based on variables. When Thingiverse's customizer worked well (well enough), it was a great tool. https://openscad.org/ https://openscad.org/
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> I long for the day that there is modern, easy to use Open Source CAD application for designing / modelling for 3D printing. Solvespace is your friend: https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl When you learn that completely and then outgrow it, you're probably going back to FreeCAD, or maybe blender with the CAD-sketcher addon.
  - smcleod 4y ago
    Looks interesting I'll try both of those out, thank you!
- the__alchemist 4y ago
  Unfortunately, this doesn't (yet?!) exist. Here's to the future. Are you a student? Military? You may be able to get SolidWorks for cheap. Not what you asked for, but is the best option I've found.
linsomniac 4y ago
It looks really impressive, seems like it's largely oriented towards PCBs though? Anyone have experience using it for woodworking modeling? Is there a better tool out there for that? I've been using SketchUp, which is "only ok": The modeling for parts is good, but setting it up for spitting out a cut list kind of sucks. Plus, it's like $300/year to buy the version that does cutlists, the web version will not. I use tinkercad for modeling 3d prints and mostly like it, it's kind of klunky, but easy for simpleish models. I'll probably donate something to KiCAD, it'd be a no brainer to donate $300 instead of buying a year of SketchUp, but "buying" SketchUp for $300 for a year for something I'm going to use 3-5 times in the year is kind of a hard sell. Been meaning to look at FreeCAD and SolveSpace. Any recommendations for woodworking?
- Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
  Kicad is oriented toward PCB and PCB only.
  - linsomniac 4y ago
    Thank you for clearing that up. Gonna donate $20.
- MisterTea 4y ago
  CAD simply means Computer Aided Design. It does not imply solid modelling.
- luto 4y ago
  Try FreeCAD.
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  Asking if you can use PCB design tools for modelling woodwork may be one to the strangest things I've read today
  - delfinom 4y ago
    Could be worse, you should have seen some of the silly complaints we got on the KiCad tracker in the past few years...particularly people trying to load 100MB svgs converted to PCB silkscreen because they want to abuse the cheap PCB fabs for artwork.
bjt2n3904 4y ago
One huge thing in this release is being able to build gerber files on the CLI. We're working to setup continuous integration here at work for the boards we make. Reduces a ton of human error being able to type "make" and get a zip file you can send to the fab house.
kayson 4y ago
How are parts libraries? I see that there are a bunch on github maintained by companies like Digikey. It's been a while since I did a pcb design but my last was using jlpcb's online editor and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to do since they had a massive public parts library. I used to use eagle back in the day but stopped being a fan once it was bought/ruined by autodesk. I hate managing parts libraries.
- the__alchemist 4y ago
  I use built-ins for KiCad when avail, or make manually using DSes otherwise. (Schematic and footprint). You can also download from certain websites, but I've found those are hit+miss; overall had an easier experience doing by hand, even though that sounds bad. I'll usually start by C+Ping a similar one. I have a separate KiCad library with its own Git repo for footprints, and one for schematic parts.
- mordae 4y ago
  I use app.ultralibrarian.com and snapeda.com. There is also https://github.com/DasBasti/lcsc2kicad https://github.com/DasBasti/lcsc2kicad that automates downloading and converting footprints from LCSC for Kicad to use. It is handy as well.
- myself248 4y ago
  Managing the files and folders and paths in KiCad should be considered a war-crime. Symbols here, footprints there, 3d models somewhere else entirely by default, would you like to centralize your parts or have them portable per project? Can't have the best of both worlds, sorry! (Edit to add: Oh yeah, any time you click to change a file, any environment variables you had in the path get replaced with the absolute path, so things which had been perfectly resilient against path breakage get brittle again automatically!) Actually making footprints, though, is super easy. If I have a datasheet, I don't even bother searching for a footprint from someone else (which was probably badly translated from some awful interlingua format), I just make my own. Bonus if I can find a 3d model of the part. (I work with more connectors than chips, so these are frequently available.) Makes it super easy to doublecheck my footprint, and then I can see housing clearance and stuff in 3D as I lay out the board. Kicad is really, really good at this now.
myself248 4y ago
The "Finish it for me" tool is the one I'm most excited to try. I literally spent last night doing tedious routing of a connector breakout, and then I wake up this morning to see a tool that might've done 90% of it for me. Downloading now...
shoelessone 4y ago
I dabble in electronics and have made a few PCBs over the years with success. That said, each and every time I get back into it I find I've forgotten everything I know and start over at the same place each time: Jeremy Blum's Eagle tutorial on youtube. It hits all of the key points I need to know from starting for the very first time to actually sending my part off to OSHPark or whatever. Is there a similar resource for KiCad anybody might recommend? It's been about two years since I've done anything with electronics (I really do forget almost everything) so the gentler and broader the better.
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  I have very similar experience. Maybe next time I'll try some tactics to minimize the re-learning curve. I was thinking of maintaining an electronics lab book.

433 points by randomskk 4y ago

A built in command line interface for exporting BOMs/netlists/gerbers is incredible. It's probably not going to be as powerful as Ki-Bot at first, but I'm going to try and integrate it into my GitHub actions asap. And, the new dragging behavior is obviously what we should have had from the start. Going to make doing quick drawings much easier.

anujdeshpande 4y ago
Yes! Pretty psyched about the `kicad-cli`. Software CI/CD feels miles ahead of of hardware CI/CD - stuff like this is awesome for pushing forward on that front
sschueller 4y ago
I am using this feature to auto test and build gerbers for jlcpcp as well as ibom via gitlab ci for all my pcb projects. Very cool.
_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
Is there a good guide how to use git with kicad? Right now I just copy folders with version numbers. Using it in github sounds like a neat way. Which files should be in my gitignore?
- blutack 4y ago
  KiBot [0] is super handy for this, the documentation has an explicit section on CI/CD usage. It does have to basically script drive the GUI to achieve some functionality which has now been added to the kicad cli, so hopefully going forward CI/CD with KiCad will be even easier! 0: https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot
- mastax 4y ago
  I use cadlab which is a PCB CAD specific Git host. It's okay. Visual diffs and such. My gitignores don't have anything special. They ignore the *-bak files that kicad makes. Now that kicad has a stable sort order for its files the diffs are pretty clean and git works pretty well.

sleepytimetea 4y ago

Kicad is excellent - I found 6.0 to be much improved and more useable than the version I had previously. I just downloaded 7.0 and it already is a LOT snappier and happier with loading the symbol libraries. I need to check if there have been any improvements in the auto-router integrations - it was pretty rough the last time I tried it out.

bpye 4y ago
I guess it depends what you're doing. I haven't tried the autorouter, but I've found the push and shove routing is pretty good.

SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago

This feels like a major step forward, not for the software itself (although it probably is) but for the release schedule. KiCad 5 came out in 2018. KiCad 6 was long delayed and waterfalled and did not come out until late 2021/early 2022. And now only a year later we see KiCad 7. Seems like release engineering is coming more on lockdown which is super great news!

inamberclad 4y ago
The forced workflow is a feature IMO. In a production engineering scenario, it's very helpful to have tools that enforce some level of best practice. Especially since the time and money to rework incorrectly designed circuit boards can prohibitive.
cushychicken 4y ago
Pretty sure Kicad Services Corp is a big factor in the tighter release cadence. Seth Hillibrand and co have done the best job of “Red Hatting” Kicad and becoming a professional services org that supports Kicad users for a fee. Also helps them guide and drive development of wanted features. I’m convinced there’s no way ODBC support would have happened without it. That’s a feature no hobbyist or maker would care about- it’s specifically geared towards people who collaborate with other engineers and component sourcing departments.
- delfinom 4y ago
  Not to diminsh KSC as Seth and Wayne are trying to expand things here and there. But ODBC support was by Jon Evans (https://www.kicad.org/blog/2022/12/Development-Highlight-December-Edition-features-coming-to-KiCad-7/#_database_libraries https://www.kicad.org/blog/2022/12/Development-Highlight-Dec...), who is a lead developer but not employed by KSC. He works elsewhere and added it for his own benefit and that of his buddies elsewhere. The tighter release schedule is something everyone wanted, just because v6 got too unwieldy.
  - cushychicken 4y ago
    Bless Jon Evans, then. That feature was a big roadblock to wider pro usage, IMO.

gaudat 4y ago

>Custom Fonts Hell yeah. Finally schematics and PCBs with aesthetic text.

realjhol 4y ago
Comic Sans!
amelius 4y ago
Does it also support custom SVG paths?
- jccooper 4y ago
  Yep. You can slap a logo on there pretty easily.
myself248 4y ago
Ooooo, this also means if I can get my logo glyph as a font, I can resize it! Putting a logo on a board as a footprint is fine, but footprints, for good reason, cannot be arbitrarily resized.

hales 4y ago

> Pack & Move Footprint Tool This is the biggest usability improvement on the list. Computers are good at menial sorting, humans hate it. For those not in the know: your nice, organised schematic gets turned into a randomly assorted pile of parts when you first open the PCB editor. Now imagine your board has over a hundred parts, including lots of duplicated copy+pasted bits. My workarounds have been to: 1. Number the parts with special codes/prefixes to make manual untangling and grouping faster. 2. Import parts into the PCB editor as a draw the schematic. It's annoying extra work (the schematic undergoes lots of changes) and requires you to assign valid footprints from the start (so your work is constantly interrupted by having to draw missing ones OR your assign invalid ones and forget to fix them later).

aix1 4y ago
When choosing how to lay out footprints during packing, does KiCad take into account electrical connections between them? (This does sound like an extremely useful feature either way, but I'm curious.)
- junon 4y ago
  It appears to now, yes. It didn't before. One of the bigger headaches (for me, as a beginner) was when you had bypass capacitors that need to be physically as close to an IC as possible. However, the two pins go to a voltage source and ground. According to Kicad, those could be placed anywhere on the board, and have no direct relation to the IC itself. This meant you had to carefully find each capacitor by its reference and move it to where it needed to be - often it was packed somewhere completely irrelevant. Now it appears to be much simpler since you can select the components from the schematic and pack them together in the PCB editor, saving a lot of time.
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    Trick is to print the schematic out, draw red circle around each "decoupling environment" and then group them on the board like that. Then place the connectors where the mechanical design demands them and move the groups where they need to go. Then do the signal paths, then the power routing, then the ground fill. Kicad doesn't make that particularly easy but one of the big errors people make is at schematic capture stage where people chuck all the decoupling capacitors in their own sheet or separate net all across the power bus. They belong next to the devices you are decoupling on the schematic. Canonical good example from the HP 3478A service manual: https://imgur.com/LQiAKtI https://imgur.com/LQiAKtI

bbayer 4y ago

I want to learn PCB design, mostly with ARM and ESP based designs. How would I learn basics? I know theory part but I really couldn't figure out why they determine which component and which value they have to use. I mean there are resistors, capacitors all over the place but I really want to learn reason behind it. Also I guess there are some basics related power, battery, UART, USB etc. Is there any source that covers all of these concepts?

tkuraku 4y ago
Read the datasheets. They usually have recommended layouts and configurations.
- Gracana 4y ago
  Yes, this is the way. Datasheets and application notes will tell you nearly everything you need to know. If you don’t understand why something is done or how something works, look it up at that point. Starting from fundamentals is going to be a much slower path than just following manufacturer examples.
connicpu 4y ago
For designing with basic components I recommend starting with microcontrollers on a breadboard. There's plenty of great youtube channels that talk about this stuff as well, like GreatScott and Ben Eater
qiqitori 4y ago
There are certain usage patterns that you will find all over the place, e.g.: - Current-limiting resistors - The resistor divider (two resistors between e.g. 3.3V and GND. The point between the two resistors will be between 3.3V and 0V, depending on the resistor values. Sometimes you need a certain voltage. For example to bias transistors. - Delays, using a resistor and a capacitor. The values will determine the delay. - Capacitors next to oscillators - Filters, using a resistor and a capacitor. The order and the values will determine the cutoff frequency. - Most capacitors on a PCB probably sit right next to a chip. Often, at least one per chip. They get rid of noise already on the line, and act as short-term energy storage for the chip next to it. - Decoupling capacitors to get rid of the DC component of a signal (i.e. if there is a signal fluctuating between 4.5V and 5.5V before the cap, it'll be -0.5V and 0.5V behind the cap. Often, you need to add a DC component and later remove it, so that's two capacitors already.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I took the time to learn KiCad and I am glad I did. Not being familiar with comparable tools like Eagle, it was very non-intuitive to me. I resisted what I think of as a kind of forced workflow with tools like these. My sense though is that it is kind of the way the industry just is with perhaps CAD packages in general and with electronic/PCB CAD tools specifically.

robomartin 4y ago

We said goodbye to Altium Designer when KiCad 6.0 was released. Altium’s focus and resources shifted towards trying to turn AD into a cloud-based tool. As a result the software people actually wanted to use suffered. Every release introduced a plethora of new bugs. Nobody really cared for cloud EDA. Altium thought they would be able to sell the company to Autodesk. This almost happened. In the end that did not happen. KiCad 6.0 easily covered 95% of PCB design needs, if not 98%. With 7.0 things are better yet. At this point, I can’t see people paying thousands of dollars per year for maintenance on tools like AD. It makes no sense at all.

fest 4y ago
> It makes no sense at all. Don't underestimate the inertia of processes at established companies. If a company maintains a part library, if the company has more than a few EEs- it can be a multi-man-month effort with potential for costly mistakes. I like KiCad very much, I use it professionally but I also was the one that mandated AD to be the tool everyone at $WORK must use for production designs a few years ago- solely because it was the common denominator CAD that all EEs at the company/time knew to some degree. The cost of having production designs in a mixture of CAD tools was definitely larger than a few Altium licenses. Now, if that was a new/my own company, I would mandate KiCad or GTFO.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  Absolutely, a couple years ago KiCad wasn't ready for production use, even just a day a month of hitting some obscure issue would have paid for the AD licences, never mind the better part libraries etc. Now of course you'll need the AD licences to work on old designs anyways so it's tricky to transition. Over the weekend I put together a toy project with a few ICs and maybe a dozen passives in KiCad and I was amazed to see how easy everything was. And now with a new release they're probably fixing things I hadn't even been annoyed by yet. Hopefully having an open codebase means we start seeing some nice autoplacement and autorouting trickle in from hobbyists and academia, like we've seen in the 3D printer slicers world.
  - 4y ago

sircastor 4y ago

I just got used to using KiCad 6!! I'm absolutely delighted that KiCad is as usable and continues to be developed on. I remember a time not too long ago where the Mac version was tragically unmaintained. I now do all my EDA in KiCad. I'm not a professional EE. All my stuff is hobbiest, and relatively amateur, but it's so nice to have tools that are so flexible.

delfinom 4y ago
>I just got used to using KiCad 6!! Then you'll be just fine, we didn't rock the boat on interface/interaction like 5->6 was.

cushychicken 4y ago

So excited for Pack and Move and ODBC support

childintime 4y ago

Related: https://horizon-eda.org/ https://horizon-eda.org/

OJFord 4y ago
? I suppose strictly speaking yes it's related, but this is like saying 'related: https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/ https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/' on a post titled 'Android 15.0'.

IshKebab 4y ago

I would highly recommend checking out Horizon EDA if you find Kicad to be as awful as I do usability wise. It obviously doesn't have the gazillion features Kicad does (though it does use the core layout editor from Kicad) so if you need those then maybe use Kicad. But if you're just doing "normal" PCBs (4 layer, no RF) then it's much much easier to use.

twarge 4y ago
Same here. Highly recommend Horizon for its library management and overall excellent code quality. It is far superior to kicad for everything I do.
ilyt 4y ago
I dunno, most PCBs programs I've tried can be summed up to "every single one has weird workflow and you just need to pick one and get used to it"
- delfinom 4y ago
  Seriously, as a kicad dev this is a neverending nightmare of subjective complaining. There was even an old-timer going on a rampage recently on the kicad forums about how PADS was the most superior EDA tool in the world, why aren't we a clone of PADS?? Basically the CAD world is exactly like people arguing over vim vs emacs
  - ilyt 4y ago
    I mean it is possible to define "bad", but it would be something like "the common actions take too many keypresses". And that's about it, which isn't really a problem KiCad has anyway. Even default keybindings are very personal. Some prefer to focus most of the common ones in one place (say around the qwer/asdf/zxcv cluster) so you don't need to move hand much, while others would rather go by easier to remember names and have [M]ove and [D]rag. I guess you can still define the "bad" here by neither intuitive nor convenient, which is to say "LTSpice", but most programs are not that.
  - 4y ago

junon 4y ago

Holy cow, this is a quality of life update for the record books. The new symbol dragging, footprint pack & move functionality and the custom fonts are absolutely killer. Amazing work here.

ArcMex 4y ago

I have been looking for something like this for a while. So, thanks for sharing.

bmitc 4y ago

Interesting timing. Just yesterday I downloaded KiCad and CircuitMaker. I want to start documenting a circuit design, mainly piecing together schematics from application notes. Does anyone have any suggestions on any other options or what was selected among the options?

bogantech 4y ago
As someone who has used CircuitMaker a lot id say don't even bother with it and use KiCad instead. Since KiCad v6 I can't think of anything CM does better, on top of that the CM forums are full of spam and it seems obvious that Altium have effectively abandoned it. I switched when KiCad 6 came out and haven't looked back - I can have as many custom parts I want and I don't need to upload my design to the cloud to generate gerbers, I also don't miss the characteristic exception errors that CM would throw all the time
- bmitc 4y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I'll give KiCad a whirl then.

dmoreno 4y ago

Just donated 15€! Thanks Kicad team!

awjlogan 4y ago
If you're in Europe, then order your PCBs from Aisler (no affliation). They are a sponsor of KiCad, and you can add a small donation on each order. Direct upload of KiCad files, good turnaround time, and decent prices.

bootloop 4y ago

I always used EAGLE for my PCB work in the past but just recently I started a new project, after many years not touching any PCB design, for which I need to make a PCB and gave KiCad a go. Most of the things work fine but the managing of part libraries I found extremely confusing and not really intuitive: e.g. different library file formats for schematics and footprints or the standard libraries being located and hidden behind some PATH variables.. Regardless, I think it is a great piece of software and I am looking forward to make more use of it in the future!

c0nsumer 4y ago
I'm in the same situation. Did a bunch of stuff with (legal, not cheap) EAGLE in the past. But for my next projects (whenever they come around) I'm planning on KiCad because it's so much more mature now.

achr2 4y ago

Some truly impressive quality of life improvements!

smcleod 4y ago

I long for the day that there is modern, easy to use Open Source CAD application for designing / modelling for 3D printing. FreeCAD exists and while I'm sure it's powerful - it's very clunky to use as the learning curve is quite high for someone that occasionally wants to adjust a model. It it certainly seems like KiCAD is filling that spot for the 2D / electronics side of things. Blender is probably fantastic for modelling - but it's not well setup for engineering / printing.

mtreis86 4y ago
I've used blender for engineering/printing. It works fairly well, you just have to set the precision to a small enough number that things pull within tolerance. There are a couple decent tool path / CAM plugins too, so it can be used for the full stack and not just making the model, so long as the gcode it spits out is compatible.
cybrjoe 4y ago
As a programmer there's something that really clicks in OpenSCAD for me. I've made a few designs that are super easy to adjust/repurpose based on variables. When Thingiverse's customizer worked well (well enough), it was a great tool. https://openscad.org/ https://openscad.org/
phkahler 4y ago
>> I long for the day that there is modern, easy to use Open Source CAD application for designing / modelling for 3D printing. Solvespace is your friend: https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl When you learn that completely and then outgrow it, you're probably going back to FreeCAD, or maybe blender with the CAD-sketcher addon.
- smcleod 4y ago
  Looks interesting I'll try both of those out, thank you!
the__alchemist 4y ago
Unfortunately, this doesn't (yet?!) exist. Here's to the future. Are you a student? Military? You may be able to get SolidWorks for cheap. Not what you asked for, but is the best option I've found.

linsomniac 4y ago

It looks really impressive, seems like it's largely oriented towards PCBs though? Anyone have experience using it for woodworking modeling? Is there a better tool out there for that? I've been using SketchUp, which is "only ok": The modeling for parts is good, but setting it up for spitting out a cut list kind of sucks. Plus, it's like $300/year to buy the version that does cutlists, the web version will not. I use tinkercad for modeling 3d prints and mostly like it, it's kind of klunky, but easy for simpleish models. I'll probably donate something to KiCAD, it'd be a no brainer to donate $300 instead of buying a year of SketchUp, but "buying" SketchUp for $300 for a year for something I'm going to use 3-5 times in the year is kind of a hard sell. Been meaning to look at FreeCAD and SolveSpace. Any recommendations for woodworking?

Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
Kicad is oriented toward PCB and PCB only.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  Thank you for clearing that up. Gonna donate $20.
MisterTea 4y ago
CAD simply means Computer Aided Design. It does not imply solid modelling.
luto 4y ago
Try FreeCAD.
ChrisRR 4y ago
Asking if you can use PCB design tools for modelling woodwork may be one to the strangest things I've read today
- delfinom 4y ago
  Could be worse, you should have seen some of the silly complaints we got on the KiCad tracker in the past few years...particularly people trying to load 100MB svgs converted to PCB silkscreen because they want to abuse the cheap PCB fabs for artwork.

bjt2n3904 4y ago

One huge thing in this release is being able to build gerber files on the CLI. We're working to setup continuous integration here at work for the boards we make. Reduces a ton of human error being able to type "make" and get a zip file you can send to the fab house.

kayson 4y ago

How are parts libraries? I see that there are a bunch on github maintained by companies like Digikey. It's been a while since I did a pcb design but my last was using jlpcb's online editor and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to do since they had a massive public parts library. I used to use eagle back in the day but stopped being a fan once it was bought/ruined by autodesk. I hate managing parts libraries.

the__alchemist 4y ago
I use built-ins for KiCad when avail, or make manually using DSes otherwise. (Schematic and footprint). You can also download from certain websites, but I've found those are hit+miss; overall had an easier experience doing by hand, even though that sounds bad. I'll usually start by C+Ping a similar one. I have a separate KiCad library with its own Git repo for footprints, and one for schematic parts.
mordae 4y ago
I use app.ultralibrarian.com and snapeda.com. There is also https://github.com/DasBasti/lcsc2kicad https://github.com/DasBasti/lcsc2kicad that automates downloading and converting footprints from LCSC for Kicad to use. It is handy as well.
myself248 4y ago
Managing the files and folders and paths in KiCad should be considered a war-crime. Symbols here, footprints there, 3d models somewhere else entirely by default, would you like to centralize your parts or have them portable per project? Can't have the best of both worlds, sorry! (Edit to add: Oh yeah, any time you click to change a file, any environment variables you had in the path get replaced with the absolute path, so things which had been perfectly resilient against path breakage get brittle again automatically!) Actually making footprints, though, is super easy. If I have a datasheet, I don't even bother searching for a footprint from someone else (which was probably badly translated from some awful interlingua format), I just make my own. Bonus if I can find a 3d model of the part. (I work with more connectors than chips, so these are frequently available.) Makes it super easy to doublecheck my footprint, and then I can see housing clearance and stuff in 3D as I lay out the board. Kicad is really, really good at this now.

myself248 4y ago

The "Finish it for me" tool is the one I'm most excited to try. I literally spent last night doing tedious routing of a connector breakout, and then I wake up this morning to see a tool that might've done 90% of it for me. Downloading now...

shoelessone 4y ago

I dabble in electronics and have made a few PCBs over the years with success. That said, each and every time I get back into it I find I've forgotten everything I know and start over at the same place each time: Jeremy Blum's Eagle tutorial on youtube. It hits all of the key points I need to know from starting for the very first time to actually sending my part off to OSHPark or whatever. Is there a similar resource for KiCad anybody might recommend? It's been about two years since I've done anything with electronics (I really do forget almost everything) so the gentler and broader the better.

waynesonfire 4y ago
I have very similar experience. Maybe next time I'll try some tactics to minimize the re-learning curve. I was thinking of maintaining an electronics lab book.