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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:

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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:

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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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  • The more I see of KiCad, the more I like. Do you find things you can not do in KiCad that you can do in eagle?

  • in reply to genebren

    For what it is worth, the last time I used Eagle was in 2015. I've done about 50 PCBs since then. Granted, most of them were small breakout boards. However, since then, I have not found a single case where there was something I needed (or wanted) to do in KiCad that was only possible in Eagle.

    It IS the case that there might be a workflow in Eagle that isn't possible/ideal in KiCad. But in every case I know of, it is just the difference in how the programs are implemented. i.e. "Why can't you do this in KiCad?" is usually answered with "... because it is better to do it this way [in KiCad.]"

    Also, if something is missing, the dev team will be extremely active in tracking and prioritizing feature requests. Unlike Eagle, each major release of KiCad makes a large step in usability. 

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  • in reply to genebren

    For what it is worth, the last time I used Eagle was in 2015. I've done about 50 PCBs since then. Granted, most of them were small breakout boards. However, since then, I have not found a single case where there was something I needed (or wanted) to do in KiCad that was only possible in Eagle.

    It IS the case that there might be a workflow in Eagle that isn't possible/ideal in KiCad. But in every case I know of, it is just the difference in how the programs are implemented. i.e. "Why can't you do this in KiCad?" is usually answered with "... because it is better to do it this way [in KiCad.]"

    Also, if something is missing, the dev team will be extremely active in tracking and prioritizing feature requests. Unlike Eagle, each major release of KiCad makes a large step in usability. 

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