This format is designed to be human readable, which in turn makes it much easier to write other software that creates or modifies these files. KiCAD 6.0 will make the migration at the touch of a button. Libraries and Schematic Filesįollowing on from the S-expression PCB library format KiCAD 5.0 introduced, symbol libraries are now described in the same format. In a recent Contextual Electronics podcast interview with KiCAD developer the burden of this code history was explained in this context in a very helpful way, and you can really get a feel for just how tricky it can be to navigate as a new developer and why this update is so important. KiCAD is an old project, with three decades of code history, so unpicking a lot of that to build these consistent frameworks for future work has been a monumental undertaking. A feature change often seems ‘easy’ from a user perspective, but requires extensive internal changes and a lot of developer effort behind the scenes. What we as users see are the changes that this under-the-hood work enables. ChangesĪs is often the case with big updates, most of the largest changes are invisible to the user, and are the result of significant code refactoring in order to create consistent frameworks for the developers to work to, whilst they add new features from the wish list. So now is a good time to look at which features are new in KiCAD 6.0 - actually 6.0.1 is the current release at time of writing due to some bugfixes - and which features originally planned for 6.0 are now being postponed to the 7.0 roadmap and beyond. But, it was finally tagged and pushed out to distribution on Christmas day, with some much deserved fanfare in the usual places. ![]() ![]() The release date had been pushed out a bit, as this is such a huge update, and has taken a little longer than anticipated. I’ve been following the development of KiCAD for a number of years now, and using it as my main electronics CAD package daily for a the last six years or thereabouts, so the release of KiCAD 6.0 is quite exciting to an electronics nerd like me.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |