News

The KiCad project is proud of our role as the electronic design application used by the Open Ventilator project. The Open Ventilator project is based on a release of the Medtronic PB560 ventilator mentioned in this Make article. The Open Ventilator project clearly demonstrates the potential of open hardware. The project was started by KiCad Services lead developer Seth Hillbrand early in the COVID-19 pandemic. It quickly gained more than 100 contributors from all over the world.

The KiCad project is excited to announce the project leader, Wayne Stambaugh, has joined the KiCad Services Corporation. A video interview with KiCad Services Corporation founder Seth Hillbrand is available for viewing. This new position will allow the project leader to continue work on KiCad as much as possible when not working on behalf of the corporation. On behalf of The KiCad development team and its users, we would like to say thank you to the KiCad Services Corporation for its commitment to the project.

The KiCad project is excited to announce that the project has joined the Linux Foundation. This has the potential to provide additional avenues for donations to the KiCad project. It will also allow the project to use donations for services other than software development. Our current donation arrangement with CERN will continue as it always has so you can continue to donate via CERN if you prefer. This will give donors a choice of donation platforms.

I don’t normally post blog announcements in the first person but I’m going to make an exception since this is rather important. This will also be my first blog post that isn’t good news. I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. I regret to inform everyone that I found out earlier this month that my employment with WIT will be terminated effective October 31st. I am not at liberty to discuss the details as to why my employment was terminated but can say that I had nothing to do with the decision.

For those of you who did not have the good fortune of being able to attend KiCon, you missed a great conference. If this years conference was any indication, you will not want to miss the next one. The conference completely sold out with 220 registrations. Attendees from all over the world gathered to share their experiences with KiCad. There were high quality talks, the badges were cool, everything ran smoothly, mHUB was the ideal venue, and the after hours events were a whole lot of (maybe too much) fun.

For those of you who did not have the good fortune to attend KiCon (more on that in a later post), there was a major project announcement made by the project leader during the keynote talk. The KiCad project is excited to announce that the lead developer, Wayne Stambaugh, has been hired by WIT to work full time on KiCad. On behalf of The KiCad development team and its users, we would like to say thank you to WIT for its commitment to the project.

The KiCad project is excited to announce the first ever KiCad Conference (KiCon) in Chicago from April 26th through the 27th. The conference will be held at the mHub. This conference is geared towards KiCad users. There will be lots of talks from users of all skill levels as well as some of the members of the KiCad Lead Development Team. The conference keynote talk will be given by the KiCad project leader.

The KiCad project is proud to announce that the official KiCad libraries are now featured on the KiCad website. The library team has invested a large amount of time improving the standard of the KiCad libraries. As part of this effort, a new set of KiCad Library Conventions (KLC) are now available on the KiCad website at /libraries/klc. These conventions help to ensure that contributions to the libraries are held to a high standard.

The moment all of you Git fans have been waiting for has finally arrived! As of August 21st, 2016 the official version control system for the development repository for KiCad is now Git instead of Bazaar. The decision was made to stick with Launchpad as the hosting site rather than move to Github in order to keep our existing bug tracker history. The development team decided that the Lauchpad Git integration had reached a sufficient level of maturity to make the switch.

We are happy to announce a new website for KiCad, this instead of the old website system which was using Confluence, that has proved very unstable. The goal of this new website is to be the go to place for official KiCad information and should support some way of having regular KiCad users contribute to the site, let that be fixing typing mistakes or just improving the content in what ever way seems fit.