KiCad 8.0 Released For Leading Open-Source EDA Software

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KiCad 8.0 Released For Leading Open-Source EDA Software

KiCad 8.0 has been released as the latest major feature release for this open-source Electronics Design Automation (EDA) software suite. KiCad supports designing PCB layouts, provides a 3D viewer for inspecting PCBs, and other functionality...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KiCad-8.0-Released

[OneTimeShot]

KiCad is a seriously good tool. It's giving Altium (the defacto proprietary professional software) a serious run. It's sort-of being funded by various electronics hardware website... it basically has a "buy parts now" button next to the "Save As" menu item...

[willmore]

Yay! I've got a couple of boards to design, so I'll give it a try. 7.0 has been wonderful.

[JEBjames]

Michael

typo

"a overhaul" should be "an"

[gary7]

I've used KiCad for several projects with excellent results. I have had mixed results with several other PCB software's auto routing, having to reroute/fix too many routes to make it as useful as I would like. So like KiCad now requires I used manual routing most of the time even though it was something that took way too much time and brain energy to complete. It seems to me that the current generation of freely available "AI" software would be a natural for auto routing. Memory usage may be a problem and there may be other considerations that may limit it's use for this application that I am not aware of. I have not read any news of this use of "AI" being used in other PCB software so I would be interested in finding out if anyone else has.

[CommunityMember]

I have not read any news of this use of "AI" being used in other PCB software so I would be interested in finding out if anyone else has.

AI supplemented PCB placement and routing has been talked about quite a bit in the last few years in the industry, and showcased at industry conferences such as PCB West/East. The big proprietary players in the PCB market all have something which is called "AI" in their product offerings (with various interpretations of what AI is). It is likely to take some time before an open source project are going to be able to design, build, and ship something, but I am sure some people are thinking/working on it.

[gary7]

CommunityMember

Thanks for the update. As you can tell I've not been keeping up with PCB software for quite a while now (I'm retired) . I sure wish KiCad would do this too.

[timofonic]

AI supplemented PCB placement and routing has been talked about quite a bit in the last few years in the industry, and showcased at industry conferences such as PCB West/East. The big proprietary players in the PCB market all have something which is called "AI" in their product offerings (with various interpretations of what AI is). It is likely to take some time before an open source project are going to be able to design, build, and ship something, but I am sure some people are thinking/working on it.

There's a lot more than that, but current AI solutions use brute force big iron of GPU clouds instead a properly well designed, intelligent, effective, efficient and productive efforts. The results are extremely overhyped by the false "AI" tag (it's machine learning, far from real intelligence).

I think it's just a lack of motivation, it's relatively easy. But it's very boring, repetitive/iterative (so very time consuming) and cumbersome to develop. A very specialized and good small AI trained by TONS electronics engineers controlled by TONS of rules can do the job easily. I guess something really useful can be done with USD700K in a "non profit" structure.

AI can also be used to read datasheets to generate symbols and footprints. It may need to be modified, but it can do the big bulk work done and make the task more productive for librarians.

There's no FOSS usable autorouter too, except old freerouting (somewhat usable, but very weird and some legal old NDA issues and... Java). I hope this changes someday. Autorouting is very useful if extremely well done and used properly, despite what some hardcore old school EEs (very talented and lots of knowledge and very old habits) and hobbyists say.

Anyway, I remember you all KiCad accept donations and I consider it's something we all must invest on it. CAD/EDA tools are extremely expensive with draconian DRM licensing systems (often cracked by Chinese and Russians crackers), extremely tied to vendor lock-in, absurdly overbloated software in Adobe style (developed by giant Chinese monkey coder farms using RAD tools) and many weird and nasty stuff. KiCad is good for public scientific institutions such as CERN, universities, Arduino, Raspberry, Google, DARPA, US Air Force, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, etc.

I hope 9.0 will solve issues like this:
- Library table chaining
- A lot better Git integration.
- Collaborative features for big 50+ projects. Real-time would be amazing.
- User Interface Modernization (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- Pin and Part Swapping (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- Stable Python API (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- Track Refining (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- Groups and Rooms (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- Pad Stack Support (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- Anti-pad Improvements (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- Thermal Relief Improvements (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- IPC-2581 Support (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
- Full ODB++ support.
- 3D Model Improvements (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).
-3D System Upgrade (KiCad Future Versions Roadmap).

I also have hopes for stuff such as OpenRoad that aims at making easier and cheaper to do electronics stuff (schematics, pcb, simulation, autorouting, vlsi, etc). This is achieved by researching and improving existing FOSS projects if possible along their own FOSS homemade stuff. I'm not sure how it's going, but this is the best way to do it for everyone.

Michael Thanks a lot for approving my post! I improved some stuff. Please follow KiCad project and help to make it more known, it's an essential part of the ecosystem and might attract tons of talented peoppe to FOSS and Open Hardware too.

There's little hopes in the proprietary EDA software world. CadSoft (Eagle developers) got bought by Autodesk that forced their draconian DRM licensing scheme (like Adobe but even worse). Allegro from Cadence was an earlier adopter. Altium is very expensive. The rest of the EDA ecosystem is more or less the same, those cost a kidney and an eye. Despite their extremely powerful features, those apps have old quirks and are extremely bloated. Lets not forget the vendor lock-in, its a lot forse than office suites and KiCad project is working very hard at importers these days too.

[Quackdoc]

I dont use kicad but can we appreciate how in general open source software really don't like v1.0 updates? The software could be the most featureful stable peice of work in the world, and if it's foss it's devs still wont tag it as a v1.0, proprietary software on the otherhand can be the most useless peice of crap and be v30.0 or whatever, I never understood why this is.

[user556]

Kicad works beautifully. I first used v5.x and it fit like a glover from day one.