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

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