Yesterday, the KiCad crew has launched KiCad 7.0.0 – a shock for these of us who’ve solely gotten used to the wonders of KiCad 6, and it’s undoubtedly a welcome one! A few of these options, you would possibly’ve seen talked about within the KiCad 2022 end-of-year recap, and now, we get to play with them in a extra secure configuration. There’s a trove of options and fixes for all ranges of KiCad customers, freshmen, hobbyists and professionals alike – let’s begin with some that everybody can admire!

Very first thing you’ll wish to hear about is the kicad-cli binary – sure, KiCad is getting native commandline help, and you may get a dozen various things out of it, from gerbers and BOM information, to STEP and schematic PDFs. Beforehand, it’s at all times been that transferring from schematic to PCB structure would have you find yourself in the course of a not-yet-positioned footprint ocean – now, KiCad 7 offers you instruments to automate placement of newly added footprints! There are routing options that automate hint drawing – it’s not autorouting precisely, nevertheless it brings fairly just a few options of a easy but highly effective autorouter to your fingertips. Final however not least, should you ever had KiCad mysteriously crash on you and also you had been to busy to do a bug report, you’ll be glad to listen to that KiCad now has privacy-conscious crash reporting for debugging crashes like these – an addition that has already helped work out just a few long-standing KiCad crash-inducing bugs.

For these of us taking KiCad work past newbie stage, there’s a stable array of additives, too! Drag&drop stands out probably the most, maybe – it enables you to append schematic and PCB parts into your boards from different tasks, and if doesn’t signify sub-design help already, then it’s positively a step in the correct path! Then, there’s options like database integration help for element data subject inhabitants, Do Not Populate indications that gray out the schematic image and take away the element from BOM and place information, simulator integration enhancements, hyperlinks in schematics which are even preserved when exporting to PDF, mechanical and design rule test enhancements, automated zone refilling, and a dozen extra cool issues. We particularly just like the function pictured above, that allows you to reverse-engineer boards by putting a bitmap picture of the board in query contained in the PCB editor working subject, drawing tracks on prime of it, even with help for aspect flipping – try the discharge weblog put up for a video demonstration!

This launch is significantly thrilling, and it might look like the KiCad crew is transferring in the direction of a quicker main launch schedule, evaluating at the moment’s date with KiCad 5 launch in December 2018 and KiCad 6 launch in December 2021. We will’t look ahead to the trove of bugfixes that inevitably observe a .0.0 launch like this, nonetheless, on a bigger scale, it looks like we’d see options get from testing to secure releases faster, and that’s a big profit for protecting KiCad the extremely aggressive PCB suite that it’s. A few of us have already been daily-driving this KiCad model in its ‘nightly’ state, and we are able to’t wait see these options utilized in hackers’ tasks!