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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 12 2018, @09:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-gratis-and-libre-tools-even-better dept.

KiCAD is a GPL'd Electronics Design Automation (EDA) suite with schematic capture and printed circuit board layout abilities. Its capabilities continue to expand.

Hackaday reports

[...] five years ago, if you wanted to design a printed circuit board, your best option was [Cadsoft's Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor (EAGLE)]. [These days], EAGLE is an Autodesk property, the licensing model has changed, [...] and the Open Source EDA suite KiCAD is getting better and better. New developers are contributing to the project and, by some measures, KiCAD is now the most popular tool to develop Open [Design] hardware.

At FOSDEM last week, Wayne Stambaugh, project lead of KiCAD laid out what features are due in the upcoming release of version 5 [Video]. KiCAD just keeps improving, and these new features are really killer features that will make everyone [who is] annoyed with EAGLE's new licensing very happy.

Although recent versions of KiCAD have made improvements to the way part and footprint libraries are handled, the big upcoming change is that footprint libraries will be installed locally. The Github plugin for library management--a good idea in theory--is no longer the default.

SPICE [Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis] is also coming to KiCAD. The best demo of the upcoming SPICE integration is this relatively old video demonstrating how KiCAD turns a schematic into graphs of voltage and current.

The biggest news, however, is the new ability to import EAGLE projects. Wayne demoed this live on stage, importing an EAGLE board and schematic of an Arduino Mega and turning it into a KiCAD board and schematic in a matter of seconds. It's not -quite- perfect yet, but it's close and very, very good.

There are, of course, other fancy features that make designing schematics and PCBs easier. Eeschema is getting a better configuration dialog, improved bus and wire dragging, and improved junction handling. Pcbnew is getting rounded rectangle and complex pad shape support, direct export to STEP files, and you'll soon be able to update the board from the schematic without updating the netlist file. Read that last feature again, slowly. It's the best news we've ever heard.

The author is tolerant of subtractive changes to proprietary licenses; other hardware hackers/tool users, in the comments there, not so much.

Previous: A Tool to Export EAGLE Projects for Use With FOSS ECADs
Cadsoft EAGLE is Now Subscription-Only
Scripts Make the (Proprietary) Cadsoft EAGLE-to-(FOSS) KiCAD Transition Easier
FOSS Printed Circuit Software KiCAD 4.0 Released
CERN is Getting Serious About Development of the KiCAD App for Designing Printed Circuits


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @11:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @11:51PM (#636882)

    [Users of proprietary tools] are going to fight any change to what they use

    Good luck with that, guys.
    The big fish swallow up the little fish, then stop supporting and/or make obsolete the wares of their former competitors.
    ...particularly in the ECAD market.
    I saw it repeatedly in the days I was reading sci.electronics.design|sci.electronics.cad.

    ...then there are license changes.

    In a previous story, the comments at TFA had a guy whose company didn't allow machines with work product on them to access any network.
    Installs|updates were done via disks and data transfers were done via sneakernet.
    The new Cadsoft-cum-Autodesk paradigm requires an internet connection to periodically phone home to verify the license.
    For that guy, that broke compatibility with the proprietary wares.
    Foot, meet bullet.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]