09-07, 14:20–15:00 (Europe/Berlin), Main Stage
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.
This talk will cover:
- The use cases that motivated Kikakuka and go beyond KiCad’s built-in capabilities
- Managing multiple projects with the Workspace Manager
- Visually comparing schematic and PCB revisions with the Differ
- Creating panels and build variants
- Importing and processing Gerber files
- Automating workflows through the CLI
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Integrating KiCad with FreeCAD
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Multi-PCB assemblies
- FPC bending
- Current limitations and what still requires changes in KiCad itself
Source code: github.com/buganini/Kikakuka
Anyware developer, from hardware to cloud.