05-29, 11:50–12:30 (America/Los_Angeles), Theater
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.
The decision to integrate KiCad into our professional workflow was driven by several factors:
-Dissonance between the cost of professional license "maintenance" and the actual value delivered on support.
-Preexisting features being removed from "perpetual" licenses.
-Frustration with closed binary file formats causing serious workflow issues (with real-world examples to be shared)
-Purposely limited interoperability with MCAD formats (with real-world examples to be shared). There have been multiple instances where we've had to import PCBs into KiCad to use its 3D export capabilities to satisfy customer-specific needs.
-A high barrier to adapt tooling to company specific CI/CD workflows.
-Recognition that a considerable number of PCB designers are retiring. New hardware developers are entering with experience in git, continuous integration, Python, and software development workflows. The EDA tool industry needs to adapt to changing demographics.
-Project longevity concerns (some Wavenumber projects span 20+ years; we recently had to open files from a 2005 project)
- Emergence of LLM technology enables engineers of all types to quickly adapt and customize processes via scripts and small utilities without needing to be software experts.
For design organizations like ours, the true competitive advantage lies not just in component libraries, but in the accumulated knowledge of how parts are configured, connected, and implemented across designs. This institutional knowledge, the real "secret sauce", becomes increasingly valuable over time but is challenging to maintain and share effectively. We feel that every company needs a strategy around their own institutional knowledge, and that knowledge absolutely cannot be behind a 3rd party service that does not use interoperable formats.
A primary motivation for our KiCad project has been the new HTTP libraries feature. We see this as the beginning of a much bigger vision and an enterprise level feature. We've used database libraries extensively, but Altium's solution has stagnated in favor of proprietary cloud interfaces. Although still in development, this capability provided us with a mechanism to migrate roughly 10,000 parts and their associated metadata into KiCad 9. By leveraging the kicad-cli tool, Wavenumber was able to prototype a parallel workflow where all parts created in Altium are also available in KiCad.
Our library migration is now essentially complete, with two boards that will be used in commercial product designs underway for release in 2025. We've also integrated KiCad into our PDM system in a way that enables rapid prototyping while providing important design traceability. The long-term goal is a comprehensive workflow to track all boards, assemblies, and usage contexts efficient LLM-based knowledge queries within the company.
The session will conclude with ideas of how KiCad could evolve to better support professional workflows.
Eli Hughes is the principal of Wavenumber LLC which delivers positive outcomes in the areas of embedded systems, software, IOT, audio, acoustics, industrial design, and content creation. In addition to his current role at Wavenumber, he works with NXP semiconductors producing engaging technical content and supporting customers with new silicon. His past experiences include working at the Penn State Applied Research Lab performing research in the areas of physics, sensors, conditioned based maintenance, robotics, undersea vehicles, and space science. His skill set includes high-speed PCB design, embedded systems engineering with modern FPGAs and microcontrollers, high-performance analog mixed-signal circuitry, digital signal processing and deeply embedded software. Eli also taught courses in embedded systems, FPGAs and circuit theory at Penn State University. In his spare time, he plays the guitar and keyboard in addition to enjoying woodworking.