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KiCad 7 is coming! (and fast!!)

baldengineer

kicad 6.99 with version crossed-out and 7.0 added lol

Post from the KiCad Blog: Features Coming to KiCad 7

One of the reasons I recommend KiCad to anyone who wants to make more than one PCB (in their life) is because of how fast it is developing. Compared to any other options, each major release has brought significant functionality AND usability to the tool. Starting with version 5, the minor updates became extremely frequent. With version 6, there was a promise to shorten the major release cycle. And based on the minor release in the 6.0 branch, the team struck a strong balance between fixing bugs and adding quality-of-life improvements. They call it “cherry picking” when adding a feature from the 6.99 (or pre-7.0) branch.

That promise of more frequent major releases appears to be coming true.

  • KiCad 4: November 2015
  • KiCad 5: August 2018
  • KiCad 6: December 2021
  • KiCad 7: January 2023 (est)

This announcement lists some new features and their contributors in KiCad 7.0’s upcoming release. Plus, the announcement hints that the release could be as early as January 2023. Regardless, my bet would be a Q1 release. And oh boy. There are so many things in this update I cannot wait to start using.

I am looking forward to the plugin manager having a (more?) robust update capability, the command line interface (kicad-cli), auto-complete routes (in PCB), and the properties panel (in PCB). Plus, many other minor features.

I’m curious about the database integration that is mentioned in this article. It sounds like the hooks to access an inventory management system. But I’m not sure how adaptable it will be.

Check the announcement post for a complete list and some demos!

Is anyone else watching the KiCad 7 development? What are you excited to see? Or even what do you wish they would work on next?

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  • I'm still on 5 and haven't made the jump to 6 yet ... the conveniences sound very nice to have, but for most of my simple project, the fact that 5 just seems to do the job gives me little reason to change just yet.

    Still great to hear that there will be more features to see in the open-source world ... too bad my workplace insists on Altium.

    - Gough

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    For what it is worth, my number 1 reason to upgrade to version 6 was because Copy/Paste now uses the system clipboard. Even cooler is that it's the s-expression description of the things you're copying. So, it is possible to "cut" from schematic, paste it into a text editor, make some changes, then "cut" from the text editor, and paste it back into schematic.

    Additionally, when re-using design elements, especially in the schematic, copy/paste works well across multiple KiCad instances now.

    There are a bunch of other quality-of-life improvements over 5. However, that is the one that I make the most use of.

  • in reply to baldengineer

    I haven’t upgraded from 5 yet because I have an on-going project that was designed in 5 and I’m happy to wait until I’m done with that.  However….are you saying that I can copy from one Kicad project schematic to another Kicad project schematic without massive aggravation?  Can you copy parts of a schematic into a sub-sheet and then duplicate that sub-sheet all within the same schematic?  I recently designed something that essentially had 4 identical channels but I started off with just one before deciding to expand it (I was going to go with one channel/one PCB but changed my mind to 4 channels/one PCB). I’ve had lots of consistency problems when trying to move a design into sub sheets previously.

  • in reply to Andrew J

    Yes, copy/paste into sub-sheets works well. There is now a "paste special" to tell KiCad what you want to do with the annotations.

    That said, each subsheets still has to have unique annotations. If you want annotations to match up in the subsheets, you could use an identifier like "R1$" and "R2$". It'd be easy to do by either taking a detour through a text editor (or editing the schematic file directly.)

    Back when I was working on the final revision of my Mega IIe project, I used KiCad 6 to copy/paste existing schematic boards into a new design made up of subsheets. Before the final board, I had 5 or 6 prototype boards I designed. So I put all of those into their own subsheet to integrate them into a single board design. It was very handy.

    FWIW, I haven't encountered any significant issues with moving KiCad 5 projects into 6. The team did a good job of maintaining compatibility.

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  • in reply to Andrew J

    Yes, copy/paste into sub-sheets works well. There is now a "paste special" to tell KiCad what you want to do with the annotations.

    That said, each subsheets still has to have unique annotations. If you want annotations to match up in the subsheets, you could use an identifier like "R1$" and "R2$". It'd be easy to do by either taking a detour through a text editor (or editing the schematic file directly.)

    Back when I was working on the final revision of my Mega IIe project, I used KiCad 6 to copy/paste existing schematic boards into a new design made up of subsheets. Before the final board, I had 5 or 6 prototype boards I designed. So I put all of those into their own subsheet to integrate them into a single board design. It was very handy.

    FWIW, I haven't encountered any significant issues with moving KiCad 5 projects into 6. The team did a good job of maintaining compatibility.

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  • in reply to baldengineer

    That’s really good to know.  When I last tried it, it didn’t work properly because it didn’t update in the meta data properly and I ended up having to manually edit files, and IIRC, there were still weird issues.  One other reason I was going to wait because I was going to take the opportunity to better organise my custom libraries - that would certainly break my project and I’d need to spend time fixing it up.