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CEP014 – Moving to KiCad V6 with Jon Evans

CEP014 – Moving to KiCad V6 with Jon Evans

posted on July 13, 2021

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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Video version of the podcast:

Audio version

 

https://contextualelectronics.com/wp-content/uploads/cep-episodes/CEP014-JonEvans.mp3

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