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
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FOR HARDWARE IT IS YET TO COME...
.PcbDoc
ALTIUM
DESIGNER
.brd
CADENCE
ALLEGRO
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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!