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KiCad 7.0

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Re: KiCad 7.0

#41

Post by twarge »

IshKebab wrote: post #26

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.

Same here. Highly recommend Horizon for its library management and overall excellent code quality. It is far superior to kicad for everything I do.

Re: KiCad 7.0

#42

Post by ororroro »

junon wrote: post #29
aix1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 refere…

In 6 you can select the bypass cap in the schematic editor and that will highlight it in the PCB editor but only one at a time. Still better than searching for C18 though.

Re: KiCad 7.0

#43

Post by magicalhippo »

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 mean there are resistors, capacitors all over the place but I really want to learn reason behind it.

There are some good YouTube channels that go into this. EEVBlog[1] has made a lot of really nice videos about the fundamentals, as has w2aew[2]. And I found MicroType Engineering[3] to be a good source of practical information on designing circuits.

Capacitors next to ICs are almost always for decoupling[4]. Similar to how the cistern in your toilet provides a large amounts of water in a short amount of time without affecting the water pressure in the rest of the house, hence decoupling the local water flow from the main supply, decoupling capacitors can supply a lot of current for a short amount of time.

However what values to use can seemingly be a bit of a black art[5], not helped by the fact there's so much outdated information and rules of thumb out there from the days of through-hole components which just doesn't apply to modern surface mounted components (like needing multiple different values).

On the other hand, resistors on a data line can be there to protect against ESD events[6], for example.

Some of it might be a bit more advanced than what you need right now, but there's definitely some good stuff for people starting out. If for nothing else highlighting areas you should be aware of.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@EEVblog/playlists

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@w2aew/playlists

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicroTypeEngineering

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcJ6UdDx1vg

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7aPb585Y6k

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OxE06n6n44

Re: KiCad 7.0

#44

Post by bogantech »

bmitc wrote: post #40

Interesting timing. Just yesterday I downloaded KiCad and CircuitMaker. I want to start documenting a circuit design, mainly piecing together schematics from application notes. Does anyone have any suggestions on any other options or what was selected among the options?

As someone who has used CircuitMaker a lot id say don't even bother with it and use KiCad instead.

Since KiCad v6 I can't think of anything CM does better, on top of that the CM forums are full of spam and it seems obvious that Altium have effectively abandoned it.

I switched when KiCad 6 came out and haven't looked back - I can have as many custom parts I want and I don't need to upload my design to the cloud to generate gerbers, I also don't miss the characteristic exception errors that CM would throw all the time

Re: KiCad 7.0

#45

Post by varispeed »

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…

I wish they made migration easier. I'll probably use KiCad 7.0 for new projects, but for old I think I need to stick with 5.1.

When I import most projects to 6.0, I get so many errors, violations and whatnot that make no sense when taking a closer look so I just don't trust it.

Re: KiCad 7.0

#46

Post by sschueller »

cdcarter wrote: post #2

A built in command line interface for exporting BOMs/netlists/gerbers is incredible. It's probably not going to be as powerful as Ki-Bot at first, but I'm going to try and integrate it into my GitHub actions asap. And, the new dragging behavior is obviously what we should have had from the start. Going to make doing quick drawings much easier.

I am using this feature to auto test and build gerbers for jlcpcp as well as ibom via gitlab ci for all my pcb projects. Very cool.

Re: KiCad 7.0

#47

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: KiCad 7.0

#48

Post by ilyt »

junon wrote: post #29
aix1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 refere…

> 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.

1. Draw bypass caps for every IC as its separate space on schematic (also declutters the schematics that way)

2. Group them together on PCB then just... drag one (or two if you have say 100n + 1n) each to each IC.

Alternative is 0 ohm resistor (net tie footprint) before every power line so the cap and IC are on separate netlit

Re: KiCad 7.0

#49

Post by ilyt »

IshKebab wrote: post #26

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.

I dunno, most PCBs programs I've tried can be summed up to "every single one has weird workflow and you just need to pick one and get used to it"

Re: KiCad 7.0

#50

Post by fest »

snovv_crash wrote: post #31
fest wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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- s…

Absolutely, a couple years ago KiCad wasn't ready for production use, even just a day a month of hitting some obscure issue would have paid for the AD licences, never mind the better part libraries etc. Now of course you'll need the AD licences to work on old designs anyways so it's tricky to transition. Over the weekend I put together a toy project with a few ICs and maybe a dozen passives in KiCad and I was amazed…

It wasn't even feature parity or stability- I was very happy with KiCad and had been using it personally for a couple of years.

But when faced with a situation, where some parts of the product were in Altium, some were made by a contractor in Eagle- introducing the third CAD tool made less sense than just settling on the one which majority of team was familiar with.

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