October 16, 2024

KiCAD - learning KiCAD 8 in 2024

Here I am, at it again. I began trying to learn KiCAD back in 2019 with KiCAD 5.0. I managed to use it to draw a few simple schematics, but never really persevered.

I just finished a project where I point to point wired a simple circuit. I got that finished and working, but it left me feeling that I would much rather avoid that in the future. It would be a lot more fun designing with a CAD system, then being patient enough to wait for boards to arrive.

I did this for some 3D printed parts involved with the same project. I was up the curve enough with OpenSCAD to get the design work done in an hour or so without any grief, then I just let the printer make my parts while I did other things.

I had some trouble with KiCAD on Fedora. KiCAD 6 had serious bugs, I spent some time trying to build KiCAD 7 from source, but ran into troubles and decided to just wait for someone else to fix everything. This seems to have worked out. I am now running Fedora 40 which provides KiCAD 8 and everything seems to "just work."

Learning KiCAD

The following is the official resource, which I have ignored thus far.

Phil's Lab tutorial

Although KiCAD 6, this is truly excellent. It is an hour and 40 minutes, but well worth it. It is not just KiCAD, but circuit design with an STM32 microcontroller. As he says, he is working up his own version of the famous "blue pill", which adds extra appeal given that I have spent a lot of time with these. Around 49 minutes in marks the transition from schematic design to board layout.

Next, try the "Hawk" tutorial

This is KiCAD 5 -- so we are sure to have some issues, but hopefully we can still learn a lot. This tutorial is actually quite good. It is not a video, which is wonderful. Also he uses OpenSCAD to generate a board outline, which I think is fantastic.

Don't waste time on the Sparkfun tutorial

This tutorial has not been edited in years and is essentially useless.

I download and unzip the files, then in KiCAD open the project. Since I am running KiCAD 8, it gets upset about the way the UV project was set up. It offers to remap symbols and goes through some kind of dance, but it doesn't work and just yields a mess on the schematic. So forget about working with the files from this ancient tutorial. It talks about "eeschema", whatever it is. Apparently this is simply the schematic editor. It is worth knowing that KiCAD began as a set of independent programs that were lumped together as KiCAD. At some time a person might have run "eeschema" from the command line perhaps. (In fact you still can).

Important keyboard shorcuts

It doesn't seem to matter if these are upper or lower case.

The "C" shortcut doesn't work

This is supposed to duplicate a symbol. It doesn't work. I just get the error "No bus selected". I finally get fed up and search on this. It turned out they changed a bunch of the keyboard shortcuts (a stupid move if you ask me) when they move from version 5 to 6. What C does (or tries to do) now is "unfold from bus" -- whatever the heck that is. The claim is that they did this to "follow more normal universal conventions" whatever they might be and who and where they are established.

The way to do this now is Control-D, where the "d" stands for duplicate. This kind of thing always leads to misery and suffering. Some poor soul like me tried to use online tutorials and wonders why things don't work. You can look at preferences -- hotkeys, although that is painful since there seem to be several hundred things to scroll through.

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November 15, 2019

KiCAD - schematic and PCB design

First a rant. Why is the term "schematic capture" used? Where are these schematics running around wild that me might capture them?

If you even do get a PCB made, how about soldering SMD parts?

KiCAD is easy to install on Fedora 30 linux: 

su
dnf install kicad kicad-doc
After this type "kicad" and it starts up without any error messages. This gives me version 5.1.4, which is the latest available.

KiCAD is pronounced KeeCAD, to rhyme with keester apparently.

Now the trick is to learn how to use it.

My first example

I make a directory "KiCAD" in my home directory. I start a new project and call it "demo1" I found the first tutorial in the following list nice -- and it didn't involve watching a video!

The Sparkfun tutorial is OK, but has two flaws. One is that you aren't starting from scratch, but rather you are editing an already existing example. The other is that they seem to think you know about something called "eagle" that I have no experience with.

A short list of vital keyboard shortcuts:

To get output, you can use print to get a PDF with borders and the title block. More useful for what I want is to use File -- Plot and select SVG. A related trick is to select the "paper size" you want to target (under File -- Page settings).

Inkscape works fine to scale the SVG that comes out of KiCAD (which is fairly microscopic).

Tips from Daniel

I have been communicating with Daniel Flohr (January, 2023). I asked him about KiCAD, expecting him to scoff and sneer. Instead he gave a full dose of encouragement and a lot of tips:
KiCad absolutely. As with anything, it takes time to learn how all of the pieces integrate together. Me and the EE, ME team have been doing it for a while so a lot of the pieces were already in place. Managing the part symbols, footprints and 3D files to get the rendering is straightforward (once you've done it hundreds of times) .

Also a lot of tricks; for example like PCB outline (like this where the board needed to be a certain size with a particular shape) are just learned over time. (Phone Camera -> email -> Photoshop ->Kicad Image scaler/converter)

Kicad is fine. One of the main reasons I've used it is that over the years, I've used many overseas EE and layout people. Kicad being free makes that possible. I'm sure that the expensive big name CAD systems have more capabilities, especially in autorouting. For the kind of boards I've always done, 2 or 4 layers, auto routing never has really added anything. I'm very particular about routing and getting the placement and mapping right makes it far easier to route.

You just need good eyes, a magnifier and good tweezers to place SMT parts. Hand soldering ok on 0603 size or larger parts. ICs like SOIC can be hand soldered as well. Forget any fine pitch parts.

Solder paste stencils are cheap. When we build out new fully populated boards we'll use the toaster reflow oven. Also have a special hot air gun that we use for rework and changing single parts. Boards with really fine pitch parts we have an outside assembler do.

RF is tricky but the reference designs from Silabs and from the antenna companies reduce how smart you have to be to play in RF voodoo land. LTE and Bluetooth not particularly difficult. We have a small solder paste reflow oven which we built from a kit supplied by this guy. Has always worked great for our prototypes.

What happened to Eagle?

And at this point, who cares? (I suppose I would care if I was using Eagle as a "free" product and they pulled the rug out from under me with expensive fees and licensing -- but that was just before my time).

At one time "Eagle" was the king of hobbyist and small user schematic "capture" and PCB design. Now KiCAD has clearly supplanted it.

In 2016, Autodesk purchased Eagle. Prior to that, Eagle made available a free license for education and small users. As of 2017 a free educational license was available, or a $15 per month subscription license.

Hackaday apparently is not an unbiased source to evaluate Eagle. Key people working for Eagle once were key players in Hackaday. And Hackaday old timers learned Eagle long ago and admit they don't want to tackle another learning curve with KiCAD, whether it is better or not. Apparently lies were told about what would happen with licensing when Autodesk acquired Eagle, and except for Hackaday insiders, people are unwilling to forgive and forget.

One fellow said:

This guy likes DIPtrace, which is commercial.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Electronics pages / tom@mmto.org