KiCon North America

Welcome talk

With the release of FreeCAD 1.0 last year and KiCAD v9 introducing it's new long-term API it's time to follow up on my 2019 KiCon threat of improving interoperability between these two CAD suites. KiConnect is a new Workbench for FreeCAD that uses the KiCAD 9 API for bidirectional manipulation of PCBs and their components.

The current state of the KiCad project.

Wavenumber LLC is a 'full stack' product design firm providing design services as well as working on internal products. In the Fall of 2024, we made a deliberate decision to begin integrating KiCad into our technology tool stack and workflow. Tooling is rarely dictated by our customers as we deliver on final product outcomes. We've found that business profitability and productivity for our use case often hinge on tooling features that major vendors aren't prioritizing. This session details our ongoing journey toward incorporating KiCad into our development pipeline, with a particular focus on HTTP libraries and the kicad-cli as key enablers.

We'll share real-world experiences of how open formats and customizable tooling have improved our processes, especially with library management and metadata handling, and how we've successfully migrated approximately 10,000 parts from our existing database to KiCad 9. This presentation will be valuable for hardware professionals considering similar transitions or looking at options for a mixed-tooling environment.

QSPICE® is SPICE-based, freely available circuit simulation software that includes tools for making JFET, MOSFET and diode models. This presentation describes and documents the interprocess communication of the different QSPICE processes so they can replace QSPICE schematics with KiCAD schematics to add simulation, marching waveforms, and cross probing to KiCAD. This will enable KiCAD users to integrate QSPICE elements that complement KiCAD capabilities to enhance their circuit simulation, model creation and layout experiences.

Designing a PCB is more than just routing and connecting components—it's about ensuring your board can be manufactured without expensive reworks and delays. That's where DRCs come in. They act as a defense against design for manufacturing issues, catching mistakes before they reach the fab house. KiCad 9 takes this further with custom DRCs, ensuring manufacturability from the initial design phase.
In this presentation, you’ll learn how to set up custom DRC in KiCad 9 to prevent critical manufacturing errors.

Configuring KiCad 9 custom DRC to prevent DFM issues

The updated KiCad 9 DRC engine allows deeper customization, letting you define rules and match your CM's capabilities. You can set up the constraints in advance for trace width and drill sizes and eliminate the guessing game.

One of the common pitfalls in PCB design is violating trace width and spacing requirements. If traces are too thin, they might cause overheating. If they are too close together, there is a higher risk of short circuits. To counter this, set the values in the DRC editor for minimum trace width and spacing (for example, 6 mil).

Vias and annular rings are widely prone to manufacturing issues. When via holes or annular ring dimensions are too small, it might lead to open circuits. Set minimum via sizes and annular ring widths to match your PCB fab's drill tolerances. Configure the DRC as per your drill-to-copper clearance requirements (prefer 8 mil). Rules for silkscreen and solder mask must be applied to ensure legible text and adequate mask relief.

Instead of applying length-matching rules for individual traces, you can create a group and set constraints for preventing signal skew.

Don't forget to validate component placement with your DRC. To prevent assembly issues, define keep-out zones near the board edges and between large components.

Configuring DRC makes your design ready for will make your prototypes ready for production. Use KiCad 9 custom DRC to enforce practical design for manufacturing rules.

What you’ll learn:

● What’s new in KiCad 9?
● Common DFM issues
● Benefits of custom DRCs for DFM compliance
● Setting Up custom DRC rules in KiCad 9
○ Creating custom trace width and spacing rules
○ Setting up via and annular ring constraints
○ Implementing silkscreen and solder mask rules
○ Validating component placement
○ Length matching for a group of signals
○ Defining rules for specific layers and regions

Coming from a background of software and only picking up production electronics for the first time through KiCad 5.1 due to business need, we'll share challenges and opportunities encountered in a nontrivial project across workflow, project management, upgrade hassles, file types, custom automation, mechanical integrations, cabling and interconnects, IP, and so on.

Unlock faster and cheaper prototype development and gain confidence earlier in your project using KiCad project templates to create interchangeable and interlocking boards.

The KiCad custom design rules are a powerful tool to verify your designs. In this talk, I will cover a number of examples for what custom design rules do and do not provide. I will also provide real world examples of how to use these design rules in your work.

Project-based curriculum at UC San Diego has been a strength over the past decade. Project courses have spread from intro to senior level, where students have been able to build robots, pinball machines, autonomous vehicles and more. PCB design, assembly, and integration skills empower students to apply what they have learned in circuits and embedded systems courses to meaningful projects. In this talk, two UCSD intro and senior level courses that include Kicad and PCB design as part of their curriculum will be discussed in detail. Discussion will be encouraged for how this student learning experience can be improved and scaled.

NCX has ripped off the bandage and moved from Altium to KiCAD. In this talk, I will discuss our decision and explain some tools we built to make it easier to deal with libraries from multiple sources. In addition, I demonstrate how we worked around quirks in the new JobSet feature to get consistent output files for manufacturing.

Circuitly is a KiCad compatible git and web browser based EDA tool, designed to be used alongside KiCad. In this talk Circuitly’s founder and CEO, Jeremy Gordon, will walk through Circuitly’s technical design and architecture. Topics covered include Circuity’s GPU based rendering architecture, its cloud based git architecture, and its collaborative CRDT based data model. This talk explores how Circuitly implements collaborative editing of KiCad files stored in GitHub and GitLab through features such as visual differences.

Have you ever wondered how product teams manage BOMs, revisions, releases, and specifications over the lifecycle of a hardware product?

In this talk, you’ll learn the basics of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software and explore some of the available options for KiCad users. We’ll finish up by showing how to integrate a KiCad database library with Aligni, a cloud-based PLM software offering a free tier for open-source hardware organizations.

So many open source schematics are terrible: they give no context, they're hard to follow, and they're mindbogglingly inconsistent. You're trying to debug or just understand a system, but sometimes you can't even tell what's a system input and what's an output! Come listen to us rant about actually useful schematics, and help us bring beautiful, understandable, and useful schematics to the open source community. We'll discuss graphical design, design patterns, critical context clues, and then present guidelines to follow and checklists that will both make your schematics better and save you from errors. And, of course, we'll discuss how KiCAD makes this all fun and easy! Many of you are experts, so be prepared to share your schematic tips and tricks.

After decades of open source hardware development with commercial programs, we finally jumped ship to KiCAD three years and have never looked back. We've used KiCAD in hundreds of projects, including medical devices, a completely open source CubeSat system (https://www.oresat.org/), and literally hundreds of undergraduate and graduate student projects.

A brief introduction to schematic design blocks released in version 9 of KiCad.

Question and Answer session with KiCad lead developers, documenters and librarians

Closing remarks