KiCad 8: The New Standard in PCB Design Software
KiCad, a free and open-source software suite for electronic design automation (EDA), available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, facilitates the creation of schematic diagrams and printed circuit boards (PCB).
With a user base ranging from hobbyists working on their next home project to professional engineers designing complex, multi-layered PCBs for commercial products, KiCad caters to a broad spectrum of users with its comprehensive set of tools.
Recently, the KiCad project proudly announced the release of version 8.0, marking a significant milestone in its development journey. Let’s see what’s new.
An update
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KiCad 8 Makes Your Life Better Without Caveats
A few days ago, KiCad 8 was released, and it’s a straight upgrade to any PCB designer’s quality of life. There’s a blog post as usual, and, this year, there’s also a FOSDEM talk from [Wayne Stambaugh] talking about the changes that we now all get to benefit from. Having gone through both of these, our impression is that KiCad 8 developers went over the entire suite, asking: “this is cool, but could we make it better”? The end result is indeed a massive improvement in a thousand different ways, from small to fundamental, and all of them seem to be direct upgrades from the KiCad 7 experience.
Original:
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KiCad Version 8.0.0 Released
The KiCad project is proud to announce the release of version 8.0.0. Despite coming only a year after KiCad 7 was released, version 8 is packed with new features, improvements, and hundreds of bug fixes. We hope you enjoy the new version! Head to the KiCad download page to get your copy of the new version (note that some packages may still be in the process of being released at the time this announcement is published). Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to KiCad this past year. Whether your contribution was large or small, writing code, submitting bug reports, improving our libraries and documentation, or just supporting us financially: your help made a difference.
In accordance with the KiCad stable release policy, KiCad 7.x will no longer be actively maintained, and we will release bug fix versions of KiCad 8.x over the next year as we develop new features for KiCad 9. Read on to see some of the highlights of the new version!