The Contextual Electronics Podcast

Contextual Electronics highlights stories of people using electronics to solve their problems. Listeners will hear how to use electronics in their own projects, by learning about new technologies and techniques. Tune in each week to hear a different guest and how they are using electronics to solve a problem in their life. Contextual Electronics is also an online education program. Started in 2014, CE pairs theory and practice for learning electronics. In 2020, we started the podcast to highlight stories of using electronics in real world contexts.

https://contextualelectronics.com/category/podcast

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CEP014 – Moving to KiCad V6 with Jon Evans

Welcome, Jon Evans of the KiCad project!

Jon Evans is a longtime developer on the KiCad project and practicing EE at Formlabs. He joins Chris to talk about the future of KiCad, including features that are coming in V6.

Show Notes

0:00 Introduction
2:15 Making changes to the platform
4:00 History of the codebase – Chat with the KiCad team about V6 and beyond
5:05 Jon’s work background – Jon works for Formlabs
8:20 What is coming in KiCad v6?
10:45 Working with legacy code in KiCad
13:30 Looking at an example project
14:50 Schematic editor
18:50 Changes to the schematic UI
21:00 Layout tool
22:45 Changes to the layout UI
24:10 The split of beginner vs advanced users
25:55 The benefits of an open source tool
26:25 Comparison to tools that are cloud based
27:45 The KiCad ecosystem
30:45 KiCad Professional Services
32:00 KiCon 2021
33:10 What is DRC? How is it changing?
37:40 The challenges of live DRC
40:15 Example of DRC
46:05 New python API
48:30 Example project for using python scripting with KiCad
50:00 How the KiCad project works with feature requests
52:15 Working with the console inside KiCad
53:55 What else is Jon excited about in V6?
56:20 KiCad as a professional tool?
1:00:05 Following Jon online
1:02:10 Conclusion