KiCad 8.0 (opens in new tab)

I use Kicad regularly, and I encourage others who also use it to donate an amount similar to an annual license for the proprietary competitors. The team has already proven that they can maintain such a useful tool with a tiny budget, imagine what they could do if they had the same annual budget as Altium...

Editable power symbols is a very welcome change. It's a small thing but it was quite annoying not being able to edit them like you can in Altium etc.

Thanks again to the KiCad team. I know a few of them personally and every person has been nothing but helpful. Our most recent project was started in KiCad 5 and it shames me to admit that there have been 3 KiCad releases since we started and we are now just getting finished (with the first board). [1]

I personally use the #kicad@liberachat IRC channel whenever I need help (when a web search doesn't find the info). It is always a great place to get help or find out the status of the next release.

Again...much thanks to the KiCad team. The work you are doing does not go unnoticed. Now...if we can just get FreeCAD the same amount of development maybe we can strip away a bit of the pain in switching from the other mainstream CAD software.

[1] https://github.com/Smoothieware/Smoothieboard2

The on-schematic visualization of simulation results, as well as improved result viewer and on-the-fly calculation of quantities such as power, are awesome features.

I use altium professionaly, and kicad for personal projects.

it it more than capable for what I need (think simple 4layer boards) and overall kicad 7 has been a great experience on apple silicon.

I have not attempted high layer count or high speed design (ddr4 ram etc.). so I cannot speak to how it performs here.

but I plan to continue using it for personal projects. if I where to do a startup I would also probably use kicad.

Wow, that's some amazing progress! I've been using LibrePCB on the (Less and less common these days, with the number of modules out there) occasions that I need a PCB, but I will probably be trying this out soon!

Shoutouts to kicad for being there when the alternatives are multiple hundreds of dollars. I'm not good enough at PCB design to make my own, but I had to download kicad to find that out.

Are there in person communities for this sort of thing? I've set myself a personal project to reproduce some circuits I have in a 1947 paper. But I'm not a hardware guy, huge tracts of the tooling are opaque, best practices are unclear, etc etc etc.

So I'm looking to just come meet people in person who know the material and can provide advice. Do such groups exist? Especially in Los Angeles?

I'm writing a comprehensive review of KiCad 8.

Please see here:

https://techexplorations.com/blog/kicad/kicad-8-new-and-upda...

I'm probably halfway through all the features I plan to write about (with video!)

Enjoy!

Here it is! I talked to the KiCad team at FOSDEM and they were so pleasant to chat with. I had questions as a hobbyist, they answered in depth, and even asked me which features I wished KiCad had. They said a lot of the QoL stuff was upcoming in KiCad 8, so I'm stoked to test this out later today.

Thank you KiCad team!

I saw a video this morning with the new features and I'm blown away at the rate of improvement. I started using KiCad with v4, and it worked but was clunky. Now, it's such an incredible tool. I tell anyone looking for PCB software that if your budget is less than $1k, just use KiCad.