Matteo Parenti
I'm an independent embedded developer and designer working on mechatronics and industrial applications, from first prototype through to production and project management. KiCad has been my main ECAD tool for years, to the point that I've built an entirely KiCad-based workflow, and I help other teams move away from proprietary software. When I'm not busy breaking things, you'll find me soldering something small and 3D printing something useless.
Sessions
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.