A cadre of KiCad developers including Wayne Stambaugh, Tom Wlostowski, Maciej (Orson) Suminski, and Simon Richter along with some potential new developers Michele Castellana and Alejandro García Montoro gathered at CERN for a KiCad hackathon the week of July 4th to July 10th organized by CERN’s Javier Serrano. There was even enough time to take a trip to visit the KiCad project founder Jean-Pierre Charras. It would be a gross understatement to say that a good time was had by all.

Seasoned KiCad users are familiar with the venerable 3DViewer tool which has traditionally been used to help verify design by visual inspection and to create images of what a project may look like when it is finished. Historically the 3DViewer could only process a very limited implementation of the VRML2 (aka VRML97) specification as produced by the Wings3D modeler. In the past two years various developers contributed support for VRML1 and a very limited implementation of X3D, which improved the support for VRML generated by FreeCAD.

A new release of KiCad has been made, containing only minor bug fixes. This release does not contain a new snapshot of the docs or libs. It does have the latest changes from the kicad-i18n repo, which contains the GUI translations for KiCad. As last time, version 4.0.2 is made from the lp:kicad/4.0 branch with some cherry picked changes from the development branch. KiCad binaries will be available for download for Windows, OSX and Linux in the near future, see the download page for guidance.

A new release of KiCad has been made, containing some minor bug fixes. These are related to the default path issue seen on Windows where the KISYMOD and KISYS3DMOD was not set properly. They are now set as environment variables by the installer such that they match your installation directory. In addition to that, a few fixes for the GAL canvas has been applied and a bug fix for the KiCad manager where it could potentially crash.

We’ve just released the long-awaited KiCad stable release, version 4.0.0! The announcement can be read on the developer’s mailing list archive. Version 4.0.0 is made from the product branch BZR 6336. This is 148 commits after the last release candidate, RC2. These are all changes to improve stability and usability of KiCad. KiCad binaries will be available for download for Windows, OSX and Linux in the near future, see the download page for guidance.

Now, approximately two months after the first release candidate we can now announce the second release candidate, 4.0.0 RC2, this is BZR 6303 from the product branch. Since the previous release candidate 115 commits have been made to fix bugs reported by users and developers alike. The 4.0 source code branch is available in the BZR repository on launchpad here: KiCad 4.0 Branch The RC2 branch has been packaged as a source archive available here: KiCad 4.

We are pleased to announce that KiCad has finally made a 2015 release branch. The 2015 stable release of KiCad will start from version 4.0.0. Currently we are in the release candidate phase and as such BZR 6188 is now known as 4.0.0 RC1. The 4.0 branch can be found here: KiCad 4.0 Branch The RC1 branch has been packaged as a archive available here: KiCad 4.0.0 RC1 Archive

In the spirit of providing insight on KiCad’s development, this report covers some of the development work within July and August. There are many patches that have been applied and this post will only summarize some of them, this is in no way meant to discourage small patches). Stable release Work continues towards a "stable" release for 2015. It is taking longer than desired to reach a "stable" point however many developers do this in their limited spare time.

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.

It is time. Wayne, the current project leader, has now called the development status a feature freeze. See the announcement. This is to satisfy the road map and finally make a real release of KiCad since the latest release, the so called "Old Stable" also knows as the "4022 release". The number is referring to the bazaar revision number for that release. The task is now to make KiCad stable, which means bug fixing.