KICAD:

A VERY QUICK INTRODUCTION

TOMASZ WŁOSTOWSKI

OCTAVE CONFERENCE 2017 21 MARCH 2017

HARDWARE DESIGN FLOW

SCHEMATIC ENTRY PCB LAYOUT

MECHANICAL

DESIGN

IN THE OLD, BAD 90s

Try to build this using a non-Borland compiler...

good

SOFTWARE GUYS DID IT!

.cpp

.c

.h

VIM

EMACS

ECLIPSE

NOTEPAD

GCC

ICC

TCC

MSVC

CLANG

.exe

.out

.

FOR HARDWARE IT IS YET TO COME...

.PcbDoc

ALTIUM

DESIGNER

.brd

CADENCE

ALLEGRO

.pcb

P-CAD

Incompatibility Inside®

THE GCC OF ELECTRONICS HARDWARE

• SCHEMATIC ENTRY

• PCB LAYOUT

• CIRCUIT SIMULATION

• MULTIPLATFORM

• DOCUMENTED FILE FORMATS

WHY KICAD?

• Started in 1992 by Jean-Pierre Charras, a professor of

Technical University in Grenoble.

• 2007: two other primary developers join the project.

Kicad is published on SourceForge.

• Steady progress. New features coming.

• 2012: CERN joins KiCad development efforts.

• 2017: More contributions than ever!

A BIT OF HISTORY

• Written in C++11, using the wxWidgets toolkit.

• Modern OpenGL-based graphics engine.

• Scriptable in Python.

• Built using CMake.

• Works on Windows, OSX, Linux and other Unixes.

TECH STUFF

OUR CONTRIBUTION SO FAR...

PUSH AND SHOVE ROUTINGNEW GRAPHICS ENGINE

Old, XOR-based

New, with OpenGL

CIRCUIT SIMULATIONHIGH SPEED LAYOUT TOOLS

HOW PEOPLE SEE USCOMMENTS UNDER THE P&S ROUTER YOUTUBE VIDEO

DEMO TIME!