A few days ago, KiCad 8 was released, and it’s a straight upgrade to any PCB designer’s quality of life. There’s a blog post as usual, and, this year, there’s also a FOSDEM talk from [Wayne Stambaugh] talking about the changes that we now all get to benefit from. Having gone through both of these, our impression is that KiCad 8 developers went over the entire suite, asking: “this is cool, but could we make it better”? The end result is indeed a massive improvement in a thousand different ways, from small to fundamental, and all of them seem to be direct upgrades from the KiCad 7 experience.
For a start, KiCad works better with whatever other tools you might use. There’s the recently added LTSpice schematic import and overall serious SPICE simulation improvements, SVG and DXF import for the schematic editor, an “export copper” option for STEP, mechanical CAD import QoL tweaks, IPC-2581 export for whenever manufacturers start supporting it, and Cadence Allegro netlist export in case you’d like to use KiCad for schematic duty only. You can now also import footprint and symbol libraries from Altium and CADSTAR, as well as import EasyEDA projects directly, and this release brings enough features that you might just want to try those importers out.
There’s much more to see on the KiCad front itself, too – separation of schematic editor grid sizes for wire and text positioning, Git integration, a new flexible BOM export tool, live previews when tweaking schematic ..
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