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The holiday season has brought us major releases of three lighthouse projects of the Free Software world:
Krita has reached version 5.0 on the 23rd: https://krita.org/en/item/krita-5-0-released/
Blender already got to version 3.0 on the 3rd: https://www.blender.org/press/blender-3-0-a-new-era-for-content-creation/
and KiCAD hit 6.0 on the 25th: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2021/12/KiCad-6.0.0-Release/
The upgrades are significant, and these three applications already rule their domains at the entry level. How much further will they go?
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A Good Month for Free Software with Three Major Releases
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."
-- Bernard Berenson
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rich on Wednesday December 29 2021, @03:25PM (3 children)
Submitter here.
I use KiCAD a lot, and that's become more or less the standard tool for new electronic design already in Version 5. Corporate users may be locked in by some SAP & Altium history, and a number of hobbyists clings to, or is stuck with Eagle. But unless there are super-specific features required, KiCAD will do the job, or, by nature of its open architecture, can be forced into doing the job with some effort.
Version 6 is a major cleanup (they have finally understood how Macs worked between 1984 and 2010...) and brings file formats in line to universally use a LISP-like S-Expr syntax. V6 will get you from idea to product on roughly the same path as V5, but there will be a lot less "yech!"s along the way, and a lot more "mmh..."s.
Really the only thing that is missing (for me) for everyday tasks is footprint-push-n-shove, where you can grab a footprint, drag it around, and all the connected traces will follow in a reasonable way and push conflicting traces away. Right now it is quite an annoyance to move a footprint, not only because the traces will have to be re-connected, but also because the moved footprint will upset the rule-checking logic. Another feature I'd appreciate would be cloning of sub-circuits both in eeschema (the schematic editor) and pcbnew (the pcb editor), but that can be achieved with scripts (which is what I meant with "can be forced into doing the job with some effort" earlier).
I follow the other two projects loosely, but don't use them in any qualified way. I once submitted a bug fix to Krita for some vector art detail as part of a wider experiment with a geometric algorithm, that's about it. I was impressed by their project leader's (Boudewijn Rempt) cat-herding skills. I gave Krita and Blender's new versions a spin, and they looked very tidy. Blender in particular seems to have progressed to an interaction smoothness that a commercial product couldn't do better. But given the feature load, that is needed.
I submitted the article, because I thought the mainstream reporting so far had really missed those milestones. For the future outlook: Blender already achieved critical mass in the past, because too many commercial interests are involved for the project to fail. For KiCAD, I think that point is being reached now. For Krita it's a bit difficult, because it is mostly aimed at single artists which can't line up that corporate power behind them - even though in terms of dominating its field, Krita is the most advanced of the article's projects, and second to none.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Wednesday December 29 2021, @03:34PM
Thank you for both the article and the comment!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @09:56PM
Yeah, I used (misused?) KiCad at work for plotting the connections in our GPIB relay array.
It wasn't exactly the right tool for the job, but it was so much better than trying it in Visio.
Overall, I think it is a great tool as it took me less time to download, learn to use and create 3 diagrams than it had already taken me to make those same 3 diagrams in any of the other tools I was using.
If I am ever actually designing circuits rather than diagramming relay layouts, I know what I will try to use first (assuming my employer is already requiring something).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 31 2021, @02:18AM
Thanks for the detailed overview.
It's nice to know about these domain tools. I have artist friends, but I never find/make time to create digital art anymore.