KiCad is a free software package for electronic design automation. It facilitates the design of schematics for electronic circuits and their conversion to a printed circuit board.
After a year of development, KiCad 7.0.0 release has been released, with this being the first major release since the Linux Foundation took over the project.
For those who are unfamiliar with KiCad, they should know that it provides tools for editing electrical schematics and PCBs, viewing boards in 3D, working with a library of electrical circuit elements, manipulation with Gerber templates, simulation of electronic circuits, PCB editing. and project management.
The project also provides libraries of electronic components, footprints, and 3D models. According to some PCB manufacturers, around 15% of orders come with the provision of schematics prepared in KiCad.
Main new features of KiCad 7.0.0
In the schematic, circuit board, and format frame editors, you can use any system font.
Support for text blocks has been added to the circuit board and schematic editors.
In this new version of KiCad 7.0.0, we can find that added support for 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse, a mouse variant for navigating in 3D and 2D environments, support for SpaceMouse-specific manipulations has also been added to the schematic editor, symbol library, PCB editor, and 3D viewer. Currently, working with SpaceMouse is only available on Windows and macOS (in the future, it is planned to work on Linux with the help of libspacenav).
Another change that stands out is that information gathering about the operation of the application it is provided for reflection in reports sent in case of abnormal terminations. Platform Sentry is used to trace events, collect error information, and generate memory dumps.
The transmitted KiCad blocking data is processed using the Sentry cloud service (SaaS). In the future, it is planned to collect Sentry-based telemetry with performance metrics that reflect information about how long certain commands are executed. Reporting is currently only available on Windows builds and requires explicit user consent (opt-in).
It is also highlighted that added ability to automatically check for updates for installed packages and display a notification prompting you to install them in the Add-ons and Content Manager. By default, verification is disabled and requires activation in settings.
In addition to that, in this new version of KiCad 7.0.0, added support for drag and drop file transfer to the project interface, schematic and PCB editors, Gerber file viewer, and format box editor.
Added “Do Not Fill” mode (DNP, Do not fill) to mark symbols on the schematic which will not be included in the generated component location files. The DNP symbols are highlighted in a lighter color in the diagram.
Added the esimulation model editor (“Simulation model”), which allows you to configure the parameters of the simulation model in graphical mode, without resorting to inserting text descriptions into the diagram.
Added lThe ability to link symbols to an external database using the ODBC interface. Symbols from different schemas can also be associated with the same shared library.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- In the symbol editor, the possibilities related to the pin table have been expanded.
- Added the ability to filter pins relative to units of measure, change the units of table pins, create and delete pins in a symbol group, view the number of grouped pins.
- Added a new ERC check to issue a warning when placing a symbol using an incompatible mesh (for example, a mesh mismatch can cause connection issues).
- Added driver rotation mode exactly 45 degrees (previously, rotation in a straight line or at an arbitrary angle was supported).
- Added support for displaying and searching custom fields in the character selection window.
- Added the ability to use hypertext links in the schematic.
- Improved compatibility with the PDF format. Added support for bookmarks section (table of contents) in PDF viewer.
- Implemented the ability to export information about outline symbols to PDF. Added support for external and internal links.
- Added a fingerprint consistency check that detects fingerprints that differ from the linked library.
- A separate tab with a list of ignored DRC tests has been added to the PCB and PCB editors.
- Added support for radial dimensions.
- Added the ability to invert text objects on a PCB.
- Added an option to automatically fill zones.
If you want to know more about it, you can consult the original publication In the following link.
How to install KiCad on Linux?
Finally, if you are interested in being able to know this application, you can install it on your Linux distribution following the instructions we share below.
The developers of the application offer an official repository, in which they can be supported to carry out the installation in a simple way.
They can add the application repository to their system by opening a terminal (they can do it with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T) and in it they will type:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kicad/kicad-7.0-releases -y sudo apt update sudo apt install --install-recommends kicad
Finally, if you don't want to add more repositories to your system, you can install by other method. Only You must have support for Flatpak. To install the application by this means, you just have to open a terminal and in it you are going to type the following command:
flatpak install --from https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.kicad_pcb.KiCad.flatpakref