KiCad Version 10 Released

Robert

Robert

Reverse Engineer
Is this the update I've been waiting for? 😲

"Speaking of schematic display, Seth Hillbrand added live junction updates when dragging items in the schematic editor, and a warning when dragging some wires will cause them to short-circuit with others, so you can see a preview of how connectivity will change."
 
szukalski said:
I updated last night. First thing I noticed is that DRC takes five times longer!
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First thing I noticed is that my custom footprint library imported flawlessly during setup. If the schematic drawing functions are actually substantially improved it would be a huge win.
 
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Also, the update for 10.0.1 is out now -- there are some bugs in 10.0.0, especially related to plugin management, that were pretty annoying.

(They're turning off the SWIG API in KiCad 11 so I've been trying to get plugins working using their new IPC model - but the IPC plugins don't show up in the toolbar in 10.0.0 unless you go through a refresh dance every time you launch. Also you have to enable IPC plugins in the settings, even though it's going away in the next major version. UGGGGHHH)
 
re: if KiCad is better or not - hard to say for sure, I haven't used DipTrace. Some things that I like about KiCad:
* Free (unlimited pads/layers)
* Open Source (so if you're stuck trying to figure something out you can investigate the code or just fix it yo'self)
* Pretty big plugin ecosystem - plugins can be easily prototyped/written in Python which unlocks all kinds of other things. (e.g. check out my other recent post on this forum - I created automatic build doc generators and interactive build helpers with python plugins). This is especially notable if you're doing PCBA at JLC, there are good plugins to manage this process.

If you've got a lot of time sunk into DipTrace (muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts, etc) it might not be worth it
if you've already got DipTrace and it's not limiting you in any way. (e.g. you're not at the limit of pads or signal layers)
 
rossbalch said:
Is KiCad better than DipTrace? Cause I'm pretty happy with that for the most part.
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I tried out kicad a few years ago and sort of struggled with the workflow. Then I tried diptrace and found it more intuitive for me and easy to use. It was something like needing to assign footprints at the schematic level in kicad that didn't make sense the first time using a PCB design program. Now that I'm comfy in diptrace, I'm thinking of giving kicad another try
 
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