KiCon Europe 2026
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All of the latest KiCad project development.
For many years we've been wanting to automate the creation of board test rigs from our KiCad designs and now we are there. Let us show you how we design boards for test and how we have automated the flow from KiCad design to a fully working test rig.
Discover how high-quality 3D component models enhance PCB layout, support seamless CAD integration, and enable realistic 3D-printed fit checks.
In the talk I will present the recent ngspice developments, up to the new release ngspice-47.
The environment for open source ngspice has changed considerably. Funding for its development has become available. The art of coding has changed dramatically in the recent months (AI as a tool to support the coder, AI for vibe coding). Some ideas on how this might influence the future of ngspice will be discussed.
KiCAD-Prism is an open-source, self-hosted collaboration platform designed to bridge the gap for teams moving off Altium 365, OrCAD, or other closed source ECAD stacks who want KiCad’s freedom without losing quality of life features and library discipline. Initially developed to support satellite electronics development workflows at Pixxel, Prism keeps KiCad as the desktop editor and Git as the single source of truth.
In this talk, we demonstrate how teams can import KiCad projects from any Git host (GitHub, GitLab, or self-hosted) to review and collaborate on schematics, PCBs, 3D renders, and BOMs directly in the browser. We will walk through comparing commits with visual diffs, cross-probing between views, and governing component libraries with submit-verify-release workflows using the Remote Symbol Provider.
This talk is tailored for hardware engineers, team leads, and organization leaders evaluating open alternatives to commercial ECAD services. Attendees will see live demos of project review, library governance, and workflow automation, leaving with a clear understanding of KiCAD-Prism’s capabilities, differences from commercial tools, and how to deploy it on their own infrastructure.
KiCad provides excellent tools for designing individual circuit boards, but real-world product development extends beyond a single project or PCB file. Engineers also need to manage related projects, revisions, assembly variants, manufacturing panels and mechanical integration.
This talk presents Kikakuka, an open-source application that adds these workflow dimensions around KiCad. It demonstrates visual schematic and PCB comparison, Git-aware revision browsing, build variants, interactive multi-board panelization, Gerber reconstruction and FreeCAD integration. The talk also discusses the implementation challenges encountered while building external tools around KiCad file formats and APIs.
Conventional spacecraft cable harnesses are costly, labor-intensive and difficult to integrate, particularly when numerous sensors and actuators must be distributed across a mechanically complex structure.
For a deployable spacecraft system, we replaced much of the conventional harness with a custom rigid-flex PCB designed in KiCad. The spider-like assembly wraps around the mechanical structure and branches out to multiple functional locations, allowing sensors, switches, heaters and interfaces to be integrated without separate point-to-point wiring.
The system was launched into low Earth orbit in March 2026 and has been operating reliably since April, including rigid-flex sections installed on the exterior of the spacecraft structure.
This talk presents the KiCad design workflow, the close integration with mechanical CAD, the manufacturing and integration challenges, and the lessons learned from taking an unconventional rigid-flex design from its first fabrication run to successful operation in orbit.
KiCad is used to design an incredible variety of electronics. At APC, a CNRS research laboratory in Paris, we use it to develop readout electronics for cosmology and astrophysics instruments that operate under vacuum, in the radiation environment of space, and sometimes at cryogenic temperatures.
For ESA's ATHENA space mission, currently under development, we are designing compact rigid-flex PCBs that must fit within a highly constrained mechanical assembly while satisfying the reliability requirements imposed by ECSS space standards. In particular, the final shape of the flexible sections must be accurately predicted before manufacturing to ensure proper integration, while avoiding overly conservative designs that increase mass and occupied volume.
To address this challenge, we developed, together with internship student Martin Prêle, a physics-based tool to predict the 2D deformation of rigid-flex PCBs from their geometry and boundary conditions. The predictions were validated experimentally on fabricated PCBs, showing excellent agreement with measured shapes.
In this talk, I will present how a practical PCB design challenge encountered in the development of space electronics led us to combine KiCad-based design workflows with physics-based mechanical modeling. The resulting approach enables more compact and predictable rigid-flex PCB designs.
AI PCB tools keep trying to automate the fun part.
The DRAM shortage broke the typical setup for connecting devices to a CI HW lab. Dropping a Linux SoC next to every device under test used to be cheap and easy. However, there's another way: instead of connecting a computer per device, we can share its USB over the network with USB/IP.
This talk will explain the design of such a board which is built around an MCU that does not require DDR memory. Yet it still boasts USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet, along with a secure element that proves each bridge is genuine before the lab trusts it.
We walk through designing that board entirely in KiCad: routing all the USB and Ethernet differential pairs, handling the Ethernet magnetics, placing the secure element, and generating test points for easy QA checking.
Lastly we'll showcase the USB/IP demo of connecting a DUT to the Linux host.
This talk documents the reverse-engineering journey behind the OpenOrCadParser project, which implements a proof-of-concept OrCAD parser. Starting from scratch in 2021, we will walk through a systematic approach of decoding the binary DSN/OLB file formats.
- Container Analysis: Discovering that OrCAD files use Microsoft's Compound File Binary Format (CFBF), which unlocks the ability to extract and analyze individual data streams.
- Getting the Alignment Right: Using hex editors to identify dynamic structures and achieve correct parsing alignment, enabling a robust full-stream parser.
- Understanding the Content: Decoding the meaning and purpose of bits and bytes to extract meaningful schematic information.
The result is a proof-of-concept parser enabling an independently developed OrCAD to KiCad importer.
Standards for quality management systems like ISO 22163 require PLM starting at the component level. Using a custom editor for Database Libraries, we build a workflow to meet these requirements without relaying on external PLM Software and integrate KiCad seamlessly into existing archival and ordering processes.
German universities and research centers contribute to the development of electronics science and technology and maintain their own electronics teams for scientific instrumentation. This presentation highlights selected aspects and does not claim to provide a comprehensive overview.
Even though KiCad has a good user interface, it is still confusing to learn for beginners. Teaching it in small classes is easy and fun. I will present my Workshop concept that used successful on plenty of events - I guess somewhere between 500 and 1000 people in total attended one of my workshops.
After attending this talk you will be able to run similar workshops in your community.
PCBJam is a collaborative KiCad port that works on the web, with a lot of added features on top of KiCad.
To many electronic engineers, making the smallest possible design that fulfills a given functionality, is a valuable pursuit. From a high-end appearance of a slim design to minimizing cost from saving real estate, there are many reasons to desire a space optimized design. KiCad has several features that assists in making small designs, but other mechanisms must be driven by the designer by non-conventional means. This talk will describe methods for making tiny designs both by intrinsic features of KiCad and how to tweak your design by other means.
With all the fun of creating your circuits, it can be easy to forget to document them as well. This talk covers some general philisophy, and five approaches to documenting your schematics and PCBs directly in KiCad.
One part, many packages. Each package numbers its pins its own way. Until now that meant making a copy of the symbol or every pinout. KiCad 11 fixes this, you keep one symbol, and a small table tells each footprint where the pins go. This talk shows the problem, the fix, how to use it in your projects.