KiCad 6.0.0 | Hacker News Reader

KiCad 6.0.0

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143 pointshasheddan28 comments

I recently learned KiCad and did some basic boards with it. It was a breeze; didn't run into any crashes, bugs, or major difficulties. I learned Eagle a few years ago, and from my vague memory I remember Eagle being a bit less obvious to use. KiCad felt straightforward in every way except maybe drawing the board cuts.

(I did run into one paper cut. The PCB DRC didn't flag unconnected nets; there's a second button next to Run DRC that checks for unconnected nets. :/ Cost me an hour wondering why my 5V rail wasn't working... )

Was also my first time using one of those cheap, small-run assembly houses. Absolutely incredible. My project was a tweak of an existing product (an RGB LED driver), and I was able to get my boards made and assembled for less than the retail product, even at a volume of 5 and with nicer parts. Crazy.

For anyone looking to learn KiCad, I used this video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7-8nUU6e3E

What assembly house did you use?

I use JLCPCB for mine and am extremely satisfied.

JLCPCB; turn time has been about a week and then a few days for DHL to drop it at my door. Their website is very buggy, and the placement preview is useless, but they do have a real engineer review everything before assembly so all my boards have been assembled correctly thus far. They even caught one of my mistakes before.

I recommend finding parts using LCSC's website (their parts supplier), as it has more useful parametric search. Then cross reference to JLC's to double check pricing and availability.

Interesting. I'm flirting with the idea of ordering boards with all the easy to get discretes on there then finishing by baking on the hard to get chips I have in stock with lower temp solder paste. I would need to cut out the parts of the solder mask with components on there, or maybe I can do that at the Gerber phase

I've been bitten by the DRC window before, but KiBot[0] renders that moot. I have it running as a pre-commit hook, and it generates my Gerbers and everything. That way, all this stuff is automated and I can't make a mistake.

Check out my project's config:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/esp32-cnc/-/blob/master/project.k...

I wholeheartedly recommend KiCAD, it's fantastic.

[0]: https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot#introduction

As much as I love open source... I tried using KiCAD to design a PCB and have it assembled, but ultimately switched to EasyEDA – not because their app is better (it really isn't), but because of their smooth integrations.

EasyEDA is connected to a huge library of components (LCSC.com) with footprints and 3D shapes and everything, and built-in integration with their manufacturing service (JLCPCB.com) which uses those same LCSC components.

I'm sure you can design your PCB with KiCAD and have the result manufactured and assembled with JLCPCB, but having looked at the tutorials to make that happen, it's not a smooth process at all. I know little about these apps to suggest a solution, but making that easier / smoother / more obvious would go a long way to help hobbyists like me.

Now with KiCAD 6 there is a new plugin https://github.com/Bouni/kicad-jlcpcb-tools but I haven't used it yet. Eventually when it matures it will probably save a lot of annoyance.

Generating gerber and drill files for manufacturing is pretty straightforward in Kicad, but getting boards assembled with JLCPCB is a lot more annoying --- you need to associate LCSC (JLCPCB's supplier/sister company) part numbers with each component, and generate pick and place files. And inevitably you won't be able to get certain components from JLCPCB so you'll end up buying those separately and hand-soldering them anyway, so it can feel like it isn't worth all the hassle.

For simple one-off boards it's easiest to do that association in the JLCPCB order flow instead of in Kicad.

I agree, it's a lot less slick than the EasyEDA/JLCPCB integration, so for people just getting started with PCB design I would definitely recommend EasyEDA over Kicad.

If they save me ten resistors/caps per board, that's already worth it.

Here's my KiBot config:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/esp32-cnc/-/blob/master/project.k...

It will automatically check your design and generate Gerbers and drill files for you. It will also generate a JLCPCB-compatible BOM that you can upload. All you need to do is add a field on each part called "JLC" in eeschema containing the LCSC part number.

Meanwhile I'm carefully importing KiCad symbols and footprints (and polishing them and contributing to the community library) into a much less popular, newer open source EDA tool…

because it's just that good: https://horizon-eda.org

The blog entry noting the tagging of 6.0 RC1 and some of the highlights of what's in it might be more communicative than just the github tree.

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2021/12/Development-Highlight-Thi...

thanks, that is indeed more informative, especially since i couldn't find a changelog in the sources.

The 6.0 release hasn't been made officially yet (the source code tagging is just the first step in that process). There will be an announcement and changelog once it happens.

This blog entry shows a couple of last-minute changes, but I haven't found any release notes yet. However, here is a list of development hightlights blog posts [0] and the 6.0.0-rc1 milestone page [1].

[0] https://www.kicad.org/blog/categories/Development-Highlight/

[1] https://gitlab.com/groups/kicad/libraries/-/milestones/1#tab...

Congrats to the KiCad Team! KiCad 6 is a huge leap from 5.x. For anyone curious, here is a good review of improvements in KiCad 6 : https://techexplorations.com/blog/kicad/kicad-6-review-new-a...

A Cross Platform and Open Source Electronics Design Automation Suite

https://www.kicad.org/

I just installed rc2 the other day, and was happy to see that I can import SVG files to the copper layer now in the pcb editor. (I have a kicad project I haven't worked on in a few years so I don't know when they made that change, but it's nice to see it works now.)

I believe that is new in 6.0.

IIRC...one of the reasons I started using 5.99 nightly was because it had that feature.

Do any professionals here use it? I did some AutoCAD in high school and tried this years ago. It felt competent and less crashy than late 90s AutoCAD, but a little more awkward.

Yes. Not suitable for very high density designs yet, like a motherboard. But you can layout high-speed differential designs with more effort than, say, Altium. But these tools with good auto-routing are very expensive.

KiCAD is and "EDA tool" for designing electronic circuits and circuit boards.

I'd recommend QCad for pure 2D CAD otherwise. I like it and use it a lot. I've never tried classic AutoCAD but I've been told that they are similar.

We are using it for essentially all of our prototype boards here at Oxide (low complexity, low layer count) -- and keeping a very close eye on it for our larger boards, where we still suffer from proprietary software. (And to be clear, when I say "suffer", I don't mean the mere principle but the true pathologies of proprietary software: license servers dying; licenses expiring incorrectly; software dying, costing lost work; formats being proprietary; etc. etc., all of which we saw over the course of building our boards.) We've been waiting for KiCAD 6 for a while, and while it's not yet to the point that we can use it for everything, it's definitely on the right trajectory!

If you don’t mind me asking, what EDA tool are you guys using at the moment at Oxide for your motherboards?

Sorry, missed this question! We are (like many/most?) using OrCAD for schematic capture and Allegro for layout -- which is to say, Cadence and Cadence.

Yeah, 5.x has been our standard at $dayjob for a while; we have a few Altium seats for high-end stuff, but most of our day-to-day prototype stuff is done in Kicad. We've completely ditched Eagle.

And obviously for my after-hours stuff it's all kicad, all the time. I've been playing with 5.99 for a while and I'm very excited for a 6.0.0 stable.

Yay! I've been watching the Kicad 6 burn down chart for a while, this is faster than I expected - looks like a lot of stuff got postponed?

wonderful piece of open source software for hardware engineering, congrats!

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