Schematic

KiCad 8 just dropped, and here are Bald Engineer’s eight must-try features! The February 2024 release brings a whole host of new stuff to the Schematic editor. However, the PCB editor, CLI, and Simulation tools also received attention. (There are something like 900 closed issues for the 8.0.0 Milestone!) Which of these is your favorite?

In mid-2021, I saw a demonstration of features for the upcoming KiCad 6. A statement caught me off guard: “the new copy/paste feature uses the system’s clipboard.” Then I watched as one of the developers copied from one KiCad instance into another. Immediately, that capability hit me as a game-changer. Not because the world’s oldest shortcut keys now work as we all expect, but because of the flexibility the method introduces! Actual text gets copied to the clipboard. For example, you can paste that into a text editor, make some changes, and then paste the new version of “code” back into KiCad.

KiCad repeats the last command when you press the INSert key ( Fn-Enter on Mac). This excellent shortcut creates incrementing labels and makes wires the same size. Both save time when you need to label the pins of an IC in the schematic. To try out the trick, open up a schematic. Click the Add Net Label command and then type a net label that ends in a number, like, A0.

In KiCad 6 (and 5), the F8 key runs a special command. It automates annotating a schematic, generating a netlist, and loading it into PCBnew. Also the “Edit Symbol Fields” is a better tool for updating footprints than the actual “Assign Footprints” dialog! This video is the first one of a series of quick tips.

This video is part of a 3 part series, with the other two parts coming in the future. When it’s time to design a custom PCB for your project, you might be wondering how to design in an Arduino. This video shows the pieces that go into the schematic. The next video will show how to layout the PCB. And after the boards come back, I will show how to turn it on.