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KiCad 8 is here!

shabaz

Installing KiCad 8 went smoothly.

First off, I went to my KiCad project folder (e.g. C:\KICAD_PROJECTS), and made a backup copy of it. Then, I installed KiCad 8. At the prompt,I chose to import settings from KiCad 7:

image

It started up just fine, with my previously opened project all ready for me in the new KiCad 8.

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After that, I went to my old KiCad folder in C:\users (C:\users\shabaz\Documents\KiCad\7.0) and copied everything there to C:\users\shabaz\Documents\KiCad\8.0.

Clicking on Symbol Editor or Footprint Editor will bring up a prompt. I selected the default:

image

When in the Symbol or Footprint editors, the default KiCad libraries will be there, but any user-created ones won't be. I clicked on File->Add Library and navigated to C:\users\shabaz\Documents\KiCad\8.0\symbols or \footprints respectively, and selected my user library and it got added.

I've not tried much so far, but very happy that this feature is available:

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The above will speed up footprint creation/editing a lot. It is a feature that was sorely missing, it should have been added years ago.

I don't know if the 'teardrops' feature is new, but I've only noticed it now in KiCad 8:

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I'm looking forward to exploring more in the next few weeks (I will use KiCad 8 unless I hit any showstopper; I still have KiCad 7 and KiCad 6 installed, I think it's time to remove v6!).

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  • in reply to BigG

    A bit clunky using it, but eventually got a simple circuit working.

    This was with a op-amp SPICE file pulled from the web. image

    In short, it all majorly revolves around two main points:

    (1). In the symbol properties, insert the SPICE model by clicking on Simulation Model, and definitely remembering to set the SimPins parameter to correctly match the contents of it to the symbol!

    image

    and (2), use the symbol library called Simulation_SPICE for all the various voltages/signals to be modeled. Like most SPICE simulators, you need to use the specific symbols for voltages and ground. so if you're using other symbols in the schematic for those, then you'll need to connect them (as I have done in the example screenshot above).

    Then you can click on Inspect->Simulator and generate the simulation by clicking on the blue triangle. If your wires have labels (like IN or OUT etc) then that makes it easier to plot.

    Not sure I'd enjoy using it regularly, but glad it's there, and I hope they add more usability for it in the future!