CEP014 – Moving to KiCad V6 with Jon Evans

Welcome, Jon Evans of the KiCad project!

Jon Evans is a longtime developer on the KiCad project and practicing EE at Formlabs. He joins Chris to talk about the future of KiCad, including features that are coming in V6.

Show Notes

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:15 Making changes to the platform
• 4:00 History of the codebase – Chat with the KiCad team about V6 and beyond
• 5:05 Jon’s work background – Jon works for Formlabs
• 8:20 What is coming in KiCad v6?
• 10:45 Working with legacy code in KiCad
• 13:30 Looking at an example project
• 14:50 Schematic editor
• 18:50 Changes to the schematic UI
• 21:00 Layout tool
• 22:45 Changes to the layout UI
• 24:10 The split of beginner vs advanced users
• 25:55 The benefits of an open source tool
• 26:25 Comparison to tools that are cloud based
• 27:45 The KiCad ecosystem
• 30:45 KiCad Professional Services
• 32:00 KiCon 2021
• 33:10 What is DRC? How is it changing?
• 37:40 The challenges of live DRC
• 40:15 Example of DRC
• 46:05 New python API
• 48:30 Example project for using python scripting with KiCad
• 50:00 How the KiCad project works with feature requests
• 52:15 Working with the console inside KiCad
• 53:55 What else is Jon excited about in V6?
• 56:20 KiCad as a professional tool?
• 1:00:05 Following Jon online
• 1:02:10 Conclusion

Other links:

• Follow Jon on Twitter
• KiCad User Forum
• KiCad Discord
• KiCad Twitter

Thank you for supporting The Contextual Electronics Podcast! Here’s how you can follow and help us grow:

• Please follow us on social media:
  • @ContextualElec on Twitter
  • Contextual Electronics on Facebook
  • Contextual Electronics on LinkedIn
  • @Chris_Gammell on Twitter
• Please consider leaving us a review
  • iTunes page for subscribing and reviewing

Video version of the podcast:

Audio version