The Contextual Electronics Podcast Contextual Electronics

Zack Freedman is a prototyping engineer turned YouTuber who makes bombastic videos about 3D printed creations and getting projects across the finish line. He joins Chris to talk about his past hardware designs and what he will be building next.

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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