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KiCad 7.0

kicad.org

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Re: KiCad 7.0

#21

Post by fest »

robomartin wrote: post #14

We said goodbye to Altium Designer when KiCad 6.0 was released. Altium’s focus and resources shifted towards trying to turn AD into a cloud-based tool. As a result the software people actually wanted to use suffered. Every release introduced a plethora of new bugs. Nobody really cared for cloud EDA. Altium thought they would be able to sell the company to Autodesk. This almost happened. In the end that did not happen…

> It makes no sense at all.

Don't underestimate the inertia of processes at established companies. If a company maintains a part library, if the company has more than a few EEs- it can be a multi-man-month effort with potential for costly mistakes.

I like KiCad very much, I use it professionally but I also was the one that mandated AD to be the tool everyone at $WORK must use for production designs a few years ago- solely because it was the common denominator CAD that all EEs at the company/time knew to some degree. The cost of having production designs in a mixture of CAD tools was definitely larger than a few Altium licenses.

Now, if that was a new/my own company, I would mandate KiCad or GTFO.

Re: KiCad 7.0

#23

Post by mwaitjmp »

bbayer wrote: post #8

I want to learn PCB design, mostly with ARM and ESP based designs. How would I learn basics? I know theory part but I really couldn't figure out why they determine which component and which value they have to use. I mean there are resistors, capacitors all over the place but I really want to learn reason behind it. Also I guess there are some basics related power, battery, UART, USB etc. Is there any source that cove…

I followed this to make a very basic PCB and had it shipped to me, worked fine. Guides you through all the basic steps with KiCad.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3bNyZYHcRSUhUXUt51W6nKvx...

Re: KiCad 7.0

#26

Post by IshKebab »

I would highly recommend checking out Horizon EDA if you find Kicad to be as awful as I do usability wise. It obviously doesn't have the gazillion features Kicad does (though it does use the core layout editor from Kicad) so if you need those then maybe use Kicad. But if you're just doing "normal" PCBs (4 layer, no RF) then it's much much easier to use.

Re: KiCad 7.0

#27

Post by mypalmike »

bbayer wrote: post #8

I want to learn PCB design, mostly with ARM and ESP based designs. How would I learn basics? I know theory part but I really couldn't figure out why they determine which component and which value they have to use. I mean there are resistors, capacitors all over the place but I really want to learn reason behind it. Also I guess there are some basics related power, battery, UART, USB etc. Is there any source that cove…

I started by building a programmable mechanical keyboard based on this macropad tutorial (see link). If you want to simplify it somewhat, replace all the microcontroller circuitry (oscillator, capacitors, USB interface, etc.) with an Arduino, and use through-hole diodes. It's a really cool feeling to finish your design, order custom PCBs from jlcpcb, do a bit of soldering, and end up with a useful, working keyboard.

https://wiki.ai03.com/books/pcb-design/page/pcb-guide-part-1...

Re: KiCad 7.0

#28

Post by junon »

Holy cow, this is a quality of life update for the record books. The new symbol dragging, footprint pack & move functionality and the custom fonts are absolutely killer.

Amazing work here.

Re: KiCad 7.0

#29

Post by junon »

aix1 wrote: post #13
hales wrote: post #7

> Pack & Move Footprint Tool This is the biggest usability improvement on the list. Computers are good at menial sorting, humans hate it. For those not in the know: your nice, organised schematic gets turned into a randomly assorted pile of parts when you first open the PCB editor. Now imagine your board has over a hundred parts, including lots of duplicated copy+pasted bits. My workarounds have been to: 1. Number th…

When choosing how to lay out footprints during packing, does KiCad take into account electrical connections between them? (This does sound like an extremely useful feature either way, but I'm curious.)

It appears to now, yes. It didn't before. One of the bigger headaches (for me, as a beginner) was when you had bypass capacitors that need to be physically as close to an IC as possible. However, the two pins go to a voltage source and ground. According to Kicad, those could be placed anywhere on the board, and have no direct relation to the IC itself. This meant you had to carefully find each capacitor by its reference and move it to where it needed to be - often it was packed somewhere completely irrelevant. Now it appears to be much simpler since you can select the components from the schematic and pack them together in the PCB editor, saving a lot of time.

Re: KiCad 7.0

#30

Post by Hnus »

qiqitori wrote: post #17
bbayer wrote: post #8

I want to learn PCB design, mostly with ARM and ESP based designs. How would I learn basics? I know theory part but I really couldn't figure out why they determine which component and which value they have to use. I mean there are resistors, capacitors all over the place but I really want to learn reason behind it. Also I guess there are some basics related power, battery, UART, USB etc. Is there any source that cove…

There are certain usage patterns that you will find all over the place, e.g.: - Current-limiting resistors - The resistor divider (two resistors between e.g. 3.3V and GND. The point between the two resistors will be between 3.3V and 0V, depending on the resistor values. Sometimes you need a certain voltage. For example to bias transistors. - Delays, using a resistor and a capacitor. The values will determine the dela…

Obvious but it never occurred to me that experienced person sees far fewer parts than layman when looking at the board, for expert its like yeah "file read there", "serialization here" (if I were to use programming analogy) but layman sees gazillion little parts magically working together.
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