Development Highlight: December Edition, Features Coming to KiCad 7

qu1ck in a follow up to the adding the PCM in 6.0 has now introduced automatic update checking of already installed Plugins and Content in MR #1276.

Each time you launch KiCad, the plugin status is automatically queried in the background and displayed:

You can also disable the update checking behavior in Preferences.

lulu731 in MR #1244 added the drag and drop handles needed to various parts of KiCad that results in the following actions:

Adam Wolf spent time in troubleshooting and identifying changes needed to get KiCad to build and package correctly as native Apple silicon processors (M1, M2, etc) bundles. Resulting in commit 98775afc and MR #376 kicad-mac-builder which took plenty of effort to decipher the correct process with Apple’s continuing effort to locking down the macOS ecosystem for better or for worse.

Mark Roszko in a slew of commits has added a new kicad-cli binary to the KiCad packages.

The separate kicad-cli binary was necessary to work around limitations on applications being both GUI and console on Windows at the executable level. Along with wxWidgets having a distinction between a GUI and console app for initializatin.

The kicad-cli brings all the necessary functions to automate export elements of schematic and pcb designs.

The currently avaiable commands are:

You can use the -h argument to find out more about the command specific options.

These changes have also enabled the STEP export to work headless on Linux, unlike the original kicad2step binary.

We hope this is a useful mechanism for users to adopt. We do plan to introduce a GUI based jobs system in KiCad 8 but see this as a interim solution.

Seth Hillbrand in commit 524b129c added support for explicitly marking placed components in a schematic as "DNP" or Do Not Populate. The resulting components are also greyed out in the schematic and excluded from any KiCad generated placement files.

Mikolaj Wielgus in MR #1220 added a simulation model editor. This is a new dialog available as a "Simulation Model" button in the Symbol Properties of any schematic symbol. It allows you to configure simulation model parameters in a GUI rather than spice text inserted on schematic and the resulting configuration gets passed to the simulator as expected. You can do everything from configuring a symbol as "standard" spice models (resistors,caps,diodes,bjts), to assigning custom models in libraries (it will even load the library and let you select individual models contained within) and even let you customize the schematic pin to spice pin pin mapping.

A long requested feature by certain users of KiCad has been the ability to link component selection to a database which is common in other schematic CAD tools. Jon Evans went ahead in MR #1282 to add connectivity to external databases via ODBC functionality across KiCad’s three main platforms.

The database library system allows creating a centralized database of symbol to footprint associations along with any metadata about your parts that can be shared across your schematics by you and others connected to the same database.

As a warning, KiCad’s intention is only to utilize a database as a source of information. It will never provide an interface to manage said information and it is up to user’s to integrate it with some other external tooling as part databases get very workflow specific very fast.

More information can be found here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/7436 and prelimary documentation is available here: https://docs.kicad.org/master/en/eeschema/eeschema.html#database_libraries

An ongoing forum discussion about the feature is also here: https://forum.kicad.info/t/kicad-the-case-for-database-driven-design/34621

Jeff Young and Roberto Fernandez Bautista in commit 840bcffefb7f9108b72eeba715536c4320fe9bee, commit 9b007ca4bf042f9915faeef0f87e4aefcc40b4d3 added support for hyperlinks inside schematics. This means you can place a text object on a schematic page and fill in a new Hyperlink property that makes the text object become clickable.

Supported hyperlinks are:

Mike Williams has worked on various quality of life additions

Mark Roszko added in commit f304e2d4f a new search panel

This panel in the PCB Editor enables typing query strings with wildcards and filtering out objects on the design while displaying all of the results in a list. The list can be clicked on to select objects on the editing canvas.

Jon Evans took over work that was years ago started by Maciej Suminski to implement a unified properties system for editing within KiCad. The purpose of a unified properties system is to enable dynamically generated GUI interfaces that can be reused across multiple types of items rather than having to create dialogs for every possible object and it’s editing options.

The Properties Panel is now available in the PCB Editor as a result.

One immediate benefit is the Properties Panel allows multi-editing objects with similar properties, simply select the objects you want together and the potential options are displayed.

Future plans beyond 7.0 will be bringing the properties panel to the Schematic Editor and Drawing Sheets Editor.

Have you ever drawn a large schematic and then finally opened the PCB board to begin a layout and find yourself staring at a jumbled mess of components to place? Well fear not!

dsa-t in MR #1325 introduced some improvements to the initial setup of a PCB layout.

First the algorithim that placed components on the PCB was improved to result in a more compact result.

Here is a before and after example of this change:

Secondly, a powerful new tool was added that let’s you select a logical portion of your schematic yourself in the Schematic Editor and with a new right click menu option in the PCB Editor, you can now "Pack and Move" the selected components as one compacted group rather than having to jump around all over the PCB Editor to locate and drag components.

Mark Roszko in a series of commits overhauled the STEP exporter to use the same PCB parsing engine as the rest of KiCad. It’s independence from the main KiCad codebase resulted in various bugs over time and became hard to maintain as the main PCB format evolved.

This change now brings the addition relative 3d model paths to the footprint. Simply start the paths with the expected ./ or ../ and the 3D viewer and STEP exporter will attempt to find the model relative to the footprint file. This change should allow better portability of footprint libraries.

Finally, "3D Path Aliases" were removed from KiCad. These were an independent system from the "Environment Variable" system also used for paths. It had it’s own file format and usage syntax which both introduced unexpected bugs. Unifying the system makes the usage of Environment Variables standard throughout KiCad. "3D Path Aliases" will be automigrated to an Environment variable on launch. However, the alias may get renamed if the alias had characters beyond uppercase A-Z,0-9 and underscores due to the limitations of Environment Variables across platforms.