FOSDEM 2024 - KiCad Status Update

[@AI_Robotics]

I love KiCAD! You can't beat the price. Please don't forget the support the team and donate...

[@Mtaalas]

The software is getting to the point I'm starting to consider it a good alternative to Altium... V9 roadmap makes it even more so... you're on a roll! You've reached that point where the software is good enough for serious professional use and that gives you money and resources to make it even better and so forth... last few meters to go and you'll be the new standard! Keep it up everyone!

[@christiankildb]

I think it's better than altium since 7... 😂

[@CallistoPili]

for the first time I've seen a Job advert stating "bonus point: KiCAD knowledge" as tool for PCB design

[@muhdiversity7409]

I refused to renew my Altium license 18 months ago. The company and its sales people behave as though they're the only show in town and are completely inflexible even to advance hobbyists. Got an email asking for some absurd amount of money to restart my "subscription" a couple weeks ago. No thanks. For the first time I'll be using Kicad 8 in anger and if good enough start planning to migrate away from Altium forever.

[@Mtaalas]

​@@muhdiversity7409 Altium IS expensive, if you pay for the updates (I'd recommend a small business to get a license, then stay on the same license indefinitely), but considering it's meant for businesses that do multi millions a year AND require the feature set, the price is a non issue. Single designer costs like 40 000€/ year for the companyt, fleet of them costs 400000€/year... few tens of thousands for licence so they can do their job is pretty much a rounding error. And since altium completely revamped their code base (which took tons of money and was a huge risk, I'm sure) they're only getting onward faster than before and are in prime position to fight against other, or free offerings. Hobbyists SHOULD definitely use Kicad or something else than Altium, but the fact is that Kicad still has some ways to go with the UI, customizability and with feature integration to get to that level. But it's getting there. And you can't stop it. Only matter of time.

[@CallistoPili]

@@muhdiversity7409 I tell you more arbsurdity. With the licence you pay, you can only use Altium around your geographical area. I travelled to another Country with my work laptop to deliver some demos to a customer and I opened Altium to show the layout. few days later after I came back to my office Altium guys called me asking why I was using Altium into another country. Unbelievable experience. !!!!!!

[@flowild]

Thank you for your work, it's truly an incredible piece of software!

[@Gengh13]

Awesome, it keeps getting better, those v9 features also look extremely useful.

[@adrien5568]

I'm hyped for the V9!!

[@mikehibbett3301]

Delighted to hear about ODB++. At this date, I'm surprised a PCBA company would demand this format, but it happened to me once last year.

[@lightofheavens943]

I love KiCAD SO much! Since i got my ZX-Spectrum ages ago i basically live between a computer and a chair and in all these years i've never seen a program that well made - it's super friendly to newcomers and is intuitive, UI is simple and easy to understand. And yet it's a very powerful tool that supports even more complexity via plugins and scripting (hope you guys finish polishing it). Much love from a fan

[@SirHarrisonPhillips]

I do hope you guys will eventually look at your renderer again. Not having control over the z-layer order of symbol components has been frustrating when wanting symbols to have lines draw over one another in a particular order.

[@jeremyhammer6699]

Looking forward to Kicad 8!

[@CallistoPili]

Interesting feature could be Team working capabilities for a very large design, ok ok it sounds crazy and not easy but I mean something you can work on the PCB and another one is changing the schematic, then the working team connected receive the notification instantly that someone has changed some parts and needs attention before to push into the repository or blindly kick off others works out.

[@TheMrLayer]

With an implemented Git Workflow this should be already possible, or?

[@phil85813]

Kicad has gone from strength to strength in recent years. Shows what can happen when people get behind OSS.

[@absurdengineering]

I think we need to pitch in for a new laptop for Wayne :)

[@_-martin-_]

Good stuff!

[@robertbrown3413]

Watch out for 'Flux' and the AI related features coming through, albeit on a handful of commercial packages. Altium is way ahead on BOM generation. On the other hand KiCAD wipes the floor (IMO) with ANY package older than 10 years!

[@absurdengineering]

“Way ahead on BoM generation” Umm, what? You can get whatever you want with a few lines of Python…

[@robertbrown3413]

@@absurdengineeringSome of us don't want to spend weeks learing python. The Mac OS version of KiCAD has serious bugs in BoM generation.

[@lucasgerads1709]

@@robertbrown3413And the Mac OS Version of Altium is doing better? ;)

[@absurdengineering]

“EasyEDA project importer” - please no. There are no decent EasyEDA schematics out there. They all look like shit. All this will do is get people to get their broken designs into KiCad. Yuck. If anything, if your design is worth importing into KiCad, it’s worth redrawing properly in KiCad.

[@sumitmamoria]

That's a serious upgrade. Well done. I wish to see a version of kicad that's self hosted and runs in a browser. Sometimes I need to work remotely, and something like easyEDA makes a lot of sense.

[@kicadeda]

Unfortunately, that is such a large undertaking, we would have to scrap the development of desktop KiCad because it makes no sense to maintain two radically independent and technologically different codebases.

[@absurdengineering]

@@kicadedaIt’s not that big of a deal if you moved over to Qt for the core library. It would run in the browser out of the box. Qt is a much nicer framework than wxW so there’s that too :)