Well, thanks everybody for showing up for those of you who don't know who I am. My name is Wayne Stambaugh I'm the KiCad project leader and I'm going to give you a little talk It's going to be fairly short today because I want to spend some more time in Q&A than in the past We've had a lot of questions that have to go unanswered and I have to spend

Two hours outside wait and talking to people. So I'm trying to give us a little bit better Q&A today So I just want to give you a heads up of what's going on with the KiC the project In the last year since on my talk last year We've had a lot of really good things happen, and I don't know how much People follow the project or not, but it's been really things have really are starting to make a pretty solid

trajectory upwards So we released version 5 in July finally that was a pretty painful I was hoping to have it out last year my files. I mean we weren't even close so and yet, but you know how that goes So as part of that we had opened up CERN had opened up or a campaign to fund versions start funding the next

version 6 We were originally hoping. I think what was the original target 30k and we ended up getting 70,000 Swiss francs in less than 60 days, so If any of those donors are in here, thank you. I mean it was just unbelievable. Yeah, give yourself a hand

For my you know being in this project for over 10 years now It's pretty humbling to see that kind of you know Generosity so that's fantastic so Some of the work packages of all so people are wondering okay well now that you got that money What's happening now? Well some of the work packages have actually actually been drafted

So the way we work it is through CERN is we create a work package then the developer usually we we don't have a we really don't Bid in the classical sense that yeah here you go do it because there's only a handful of developers that can really You really get yes actually dig around in the key cad code base because it's rather large and rather complex

so there's a handful of people that can fulfill those packages and some of them have already been assigned and metered out so Talk a little bit more than that a little bit more about that later But on the donation front there's been a lot of interesting developments our friends at Eisler Have yep there. They are there

The gentleman who did the last presentation he's also part of Eisler They're Donating every board order they get that has this with a key cad file with a known key like you sending send them your PCB new file They make a donation for every order that you that you order from with key cad

And it goes directly to CERN and that's set up, but it's all automatic And they've also added an extra link on their website so when you place your order, and if you want to donate At the same time as you place your board order that also goes directly to CERN to the key cad foundation, so Thank Thank You Eisler for that I don't know how familiar Europe is with the system 76 people, but system 76 is a US

Linux they're a big Ubuntu Computer maker and they do laptops and desktops and You know they basically always bought pre-made hardware for their you know like like a lot of resellers do

Last year they decided they were going to do a new desktop called Thilios, and I don't know if you've seen them yet But they're very cool They're very new if you get a chance go to the website and look them up And they took they gave us a percentage of they decided to donate to For open source software projects that they use in-house to do there to you know run their business and last year between

I think it was like November to the end of January this year Their total sales, and I haven't heard what that amount is yet But they're gonna take a part of that and donate to KiCad as well, so that's really good news They gave and they created this quirky little promotional video I don't know if you've any since anybody's seen it, but there's a link to it there that has KiCad in it and

On the another person who wrote there's a gentleman who wrote a book called KiCad like a pro with a company called tech explorations He's also going to donate for every every per every sale of the book He's also going to donate a percentage of the proceeds to the KiCad through CERN

That's in the final because it takes a bit to get the routing done and whatnot that's almost In the process of being improved approved, so that should be done soon And of course there's the never-ending like improvements in our symbol footprint and model 3d our 3d model libraries I don't know how many of you use KiCad directly

But if you look back if you go back and look at our libraries at four and you go look at them now I mean think I what is our library up to like five gigabytes six gigabytes a download Is it true? Yeah, it's too really and they're really high quality We have some people that are really really really in fact There's more contributors to the live. I think the library developed the library group in there is source

You know the actual source developers, so it's really phenomenal. What's going on there? this year About a year about two years ago We had a couple of new developers That joined the project and they got up speed really fast and did a lot of contributions so for the first time in a long time, I've actually given three developers commit acts that commit privileges to the

The main source repo and KiCad and that's really helped move development along really quickly in the last year. It's been pretty phenomenal We also have new developers. We have a lot more people like at the fringes You know I see patches from people that I don't recognize so that's really encouraging that interested to help

Contribute to KiCad keeps growing For those of you in the US, and if you haven't heard this in the US in April April 27th or 26th and 27th in Chicago there's going to be the first ever Keycon there's going to be a conference and it's going to be user user focused It's not going to be I'm not going to be talking. I don't think I'm going to be talking to developers

So if you're if you're interested To get a chance to go to that I think it's going to be really good the people that are helping to run it Chris Gamel and Some of the other folks that live up in the Chicago in that at the Great Lakes area They really it looks like they're going to have a nice thing in it so far

We got digikey is one of our primary sponsors. We got The the folks I don't know if you're familiar with snap EDA They're like a library they provide library tools for our friends at eyes. Yes our friends eyes were also I saw you up there So yeah, we're all looking forward to that should be interesting and that'll be like two days of

you know personal experience people who use key cad on a regular basis, I think some of the I Want to say some of the Maker Faire people are going to be there to do some of the talks, you know You know their experience how they use key cad and things they do with key cad. So that's

That's really really interesting. And so if you get a chance, I highly recommend you that you Show up and make make it to that I think that's gonna be a lot of fun. And of course I get to do the keynote on that one. So So yeah, that'll be the first ever kite key cad conference anywhere in the world. So That's exciting. Okay So you're probably going well

Where's version six because you know everybody you get one version out and everybody's gonna the first question out of everybody's mouth is when's version Six coming out. Well hasn't started yet, and there's a reason for that On Linux we ran into a problem. There's been a transition with WX widgets, which is our primary tools, which is our UI to toolset They've been migrating over to GTK from GTK 2 to GTK 3 right? Well, we ran into a problem because wx

Python which is our glue which is our glue Python interface still is built with GTK 2 because it can't be built with GTK 3 and and and Python 2 it has to be built with Python 2 so you can't run a GTK 2 instance and a GTK 3 instance in

The same application boom, so we I had to make a decision It wasn't one I wanted to make but we're gonna have to fix it So that's that's why we're getting a version 5.1 and that's going to be that's what drove that So what drove the other problem with that was GTK 3 their standard canvas is completely broken

Not it doesn't work at all. So we were completely screwed So if you use the legacy canvas if you're familiar with key cat and use the legacy canvas Like in the the board editor the schematic editor the graphics are complete junk. And so we were like, ah So we had to port the graphics the high-end graphics library from the P the board editor

To the schematic editor that's already done. It's been done for a while So we had to disable the legacy canvas because it would be useful We get a bug, you know bug reports when that first transition first took place the bug You know, the bug tracker was just flooded with the same bug report, basically

We had to modify the Python scripting to support two and three before we only supported two because we only had to WX Python only supported Python two, but the new Phoenix project which is the next evolution of WX Python Only supports three. So now we have to be able to build with two and three and all the different combinations of WX

Python WX WX widgets and GTK 2 and GTK 3 It's a mess. So We did the we updated the there's been a lot of UI interface changes, which is You'll notice that the footprint editor now looks like the symbol library editor We have the pane on the left and all the you know

All your footprints show up and you can edit it. It's very similar in design because we had the five transition We had the leftover We had the new design and the schematic symbol editor the old design in the footprint editor and that's been fixed We switched to Cairo for printing. We get a little bit better quality

Printing for so that was a big change The usability view I can't under I can't overstate the UI changes We one of our new developers is a ex-adobe. He's a retired Adobe employee He's a UI guy and he just bangs out code like yeah, he makes the rest of us look bad He's really good. So the UI

If nothing else 5.1 will be compelling just for the UI changes and fixes. It's really significant I mean even though there's no new functionality in there It's just the whole feel of you know, he's basically the whole you know The whole suite of your dialogues and how they behave it's and so, you know, there it's a lot more coherent than it's ever been

Which if you use key CAD, you know, that's not always been the case. Well, I mean, it's you know You got 20 different people over 20 some odd years doing it's just how we're that's how it works And it's not we're not the only open source project that suffers from that problem So and we had approved clipboard supports and now it's more like your normal Cut copy paste instead of the old way we did it

It's still it's still we still don't do a lot of Copy and paste between the different editor editors There's because that's a tricky proposition because some things you can't paste From a footprint editor from the board into the footprint editor because some of those things don't mean anything to the footprint So we're gonna work on that in version 6. So we feature-freezed we did the feature freeze in December and

We were tantalizingly close to getting RC one out I was really wanted to have another bullet here that said RC ones been tagged and released but it didn't happen because there's one bug left and

The egg sitting up there that nobody can figure and he's got the only computer. He's got the only computer No, I wouldn't have believed if I wouldn't have seen it with my own eyes But we spent some time this morning and it didn't fix it. So you get that one That's the last that's the last Showstopper that's holding up the Five point one RC one then after RC ones released. I'll give the

Translators and our librarian guys, you know chance to get their last-minute changes in and get everything ready. So hopefully Hopefully nothing to agree just goes wrong. We should be Late at the end of February beginning of March five point one should be rolling out

So so that's kind of exciting and then once once we branch five point one then the the main repo will be open for version six development and because I know there's quite a few people that have some significant changes and Features that are actually ready to merge. It's just I don't it I don't want if I open the merge window up

everybody will forget about getting this done and we'll go work on six and Then we really need to get this out and get it done. Just just because I don't want our Linux users to be Have half key we could give them like half a key cad and I don't I didn't think that was a good option So I made a decision to postpone v6 development So that that's all my shoulders, but I think it was a good decision at least the way I see it

I'm not going to talk too much about version six. I've talked about that before you can always go to the key Cad website and see the roadmap The v6 roadmap some of that stuff's already been pulled in to be like the the graphics layer That was actually pulled in to fix the problem. So some of that's it's a little out of date But most of the most everything else that's going to happen in V and version six is

already already defined so and Just don't want to say thank you again I'd like to thank every to everybody who contributed to key cad whether it's I mean whether it's libraries

Translations source code. There's a lot of people that actually work on key cad that make you know, make it work It's a really big project people don't I don't think people realize how many How much there is involved in all the like the packaging the you know The guys who maintain our server our build servers all that stuff a lot of work goes on behind the scenes

I mean, I might be out in front of everybody here, but there's a lot of people that make that happen Once again, thanks to everybody that donated. I mean, like I said, that's 70k Swiss francs was huge. I mean, dude I'm not can't I can't overstate that enough. Um Thank you for your interest and support I you know, we keep growing the number of report

I get a lot of reports from people, um board vendors They tell me that the number of orders they get now from key cad is really Like osh park in the united states that I I know some of their their guys and they tell me the number of orders You know board orders they get that are direct key cad order, you know Because they you don't have to convert everything to gerber You just send them your board file and it they they produce your boards from the right from the key cad

And the number just keeps growing and growing so We're definitely making inroads. Um, and that's really that's the goal. The goal is to keep moving key cad I'm an engineer. So if people don't know that i'm a double e right and the reason I Work on key cad is I actually use key cad in my day job, right so it is capable

And if you don't haven't seen if you don't believe that go look around some of the really complex projects that people are doing I mean really complex stuff, you know, we have a guy that wants us to go above 30. He has a 32 layer board And he wants us right now. That's our limit. We have 32 32 copper layers

Let me let me clarify that a little bit. He wants to do more than 32 copper layers So, I mean it's serious it's serious I mean so yes, we're We're we're are we on par with the big players? No But every every version that comes out every new version six or six will close a lot of the feature gaps, you know So we're just you know, we're just marching along we'll get there. We're going to get there eventually

But it's definitely something that you can really uh make at Use to uh, if you're a if you're an engineer and you need a board layout You know, especially if cost isn't because I work for small companies So cost is a factor and almost all the big players in that game now are very very it's expensive

It's really really expensive to you know, buy My board development suites, you know, if anybody works in the commercial world, they know what i'm talking about um I also like to thank cern and javi are for setting all this up. This wouldn't happen without them So thank thank you to them for setting it up. So

All right any questions Yep Oh the question is what is 70 What's that? Oh, thanks

Yeah, the question is what is 70 000 swiss francs? It's almost It's it's just slightly more than a us dollar. So it's almost it's almost one to one you could almost I think in the There you go And your second question go ahead so yes, uh second question is i've been using eagle for some time

I think there's still some problems with the eagle import Are there any plans to fix which? Uh, the question was there were some still issues with the eagle import and so my next question is going to be which we we know there's some things because

key cad there's some functionality in key cad that does that Like the the biggest thing I can think of is um constraints like the uh, the the the geometry constraints the geometry Um constraints in eagle don't map one to one to what key cad does now some of that's That's one of the version six fixes is we're going to have a full-featured constraint manager

So at some point we should be able to get pretty damn I don't know if we'll ever get 100 because they use a kind of a funky matrix thing, right? With it's a little different than what? Um, so we may never get pure 100 import in but everything else So, I mean the issues i'm having so

I like running instead of the oblongs Which are much smaller pads Oh, okay. All right. All right. I think i'm just trying to understand So so the question is is And i'm assuming eagle can do this on the fly because it's been a long time since I mean

I haven't used eagles in a deck over a decade. So it's I'm, not not really I don't even remember that far back hardly anymore. So, um the question was About being able to change pad shapes on the fly when you import it And that's probably going to be problematic because we usually we use hard

Um, basically hard-coded Pad geometry. So like if you have a footprint right now, you can update a footprint Like say you change your existing footprint We have a way to update automatically, but we don't have a way to change them on the fly like Say I instead I don't want all my pads to be oblong instead of round. Yeah, we don't have a way to do that It'd be nice if just when you import an eagle project into

Keypad it would actually read those design rules and say actually no I need at the import stage. Okay, because otherwise then you get bored It's just all right Okay, we'll have to look at the top So we'll have to look at that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I haven't looked at that So I don't know what the answer to that is

Okay I think three or four months ago at least Yeah, well I haven't I have to talk. Yeah, I don't do much work with the eagle importer. So that's not my my exact straight strong point, so

Yeah, it's And we know we know that we know that from other and we know that from other board

yeah, we Yeah, we know we know that from other board packages too that when you pull a constraint in what it means and that board Package means doesn't necessarily map to the same constraints that we have in keycat. It's not it's not an easy problem to solve Yep

The question that somebody people know me in here, so they're gonna know what the answer to that question the question was The question was could we simplify the uh user interface the key cad user interface so that it's easier to use and it'd be more like fritzing

I'm gonna I you know what if when we have all the other problems solved we can talk about that I mean Yeah, we get and I and don't get me wrong I i'd love to support everybody's project every way they wanted it But that's just not reality. I mean one of the problems I get is every once in a while

Somebody always gets mad because our ui doesn't work well on a 800 by 600 resolution monitor like i'm sorry Who who lays out boards on a 800 by 600 monitor who does that? My eyes aren't good enough to do that They don't make monitors big enough to lay out boards and so when I hear people say that i'm like come on

So yeah, I mean I I get it. I get it if there was some way it was easy to make You know make all those like different configurations work But it's yeah, we got to me. That's like one Okay, when we got all these features done and we're on par with the big guys Okay, we can go back and revisit that but I think we got a lot of work to do before we get to that point

So, uh, yeah, go ahead Okay, the question was the question was um moving from right now the the source

The the question was moving from launchpad to get get lab, right? Yeah. Okay there's um I didn't talk about it. I probably should have there's currently We are in the process of migrating. Um the key cad servers. I think the web server is done correct me if i'm wrong Yeah Yeah, so we're migrating to cern servers, okay, so the website's done

Is that are the downloads are the package downloads done, too? Okay And part of that discussion was at some point in the future because one of the problems right now if you don't know

You know key cad the source is still in launchpad with with that. I mean we use git but it's launch pads supported git isn't necessarily the best um, so we're there with That's where our source is and of course like the libraries are all in github

And so for me as a project manager because I got to interface with all those different Just separate groups. It actually makes more work for me. So the whole the the the end goal is to get all that in a git lab instance somewhere and so Just going to take time, you know, but yes that has been talked about and it's It probably will happen at some point when

You know, we just one step at a time We just got to you know, I don't want to try to you know I don't want to create a lot of work for you know, because that's something I don't do so that means it's work somebody else does and I really don't want to You know bury somebody and just on a whim say we're just going to totally migrate to git lab tomorrow And that's not very realistic, but I think it'll happen. Yeah

Yeah But to switch on I would like to head start some Go to somebody with some problem and talk together and see how he works

Okay, the question is is there a list you can go to for i'm assuming you mean user support or help Yes, there is the the there's the keycat info There's a there's a forum and it's pretty heavily It's pretty big. I mean, it's it's run by chris gamel in the united states. He set it up

It's really uh, you know a lot of times some of the developers show up there, you know for like the really tough stuff or The regular even the advanced users don't necessarily know the answer to the question, but it's actually a pretty good It's actually a pretty good resource for a new user. It's very good. There's a lot, you know There's usually somebody that can answer your question Yeah, you don't don't don't post user questions on the mail the dev mailing list

It'll take a while for you to get an answer. But but yeah keycat info if you go to our website and go under Is it resources there's a drop down you'll see the blogs it's under there use a direct link to it You can go go to it from there. Yeah Actually have three question questions if you don't mind, uh first one about schematic editor

So schematic editor we need to really think as components before we only have rubber band connection, right? So if you try to drag a component when we already connected them it's uh

Basically need to remove all connections and do it rubber band Yes, the question is are we going to get rubber banding support I think that's in six, isn't it? Yeah, it's in the road map the six road map So we have plan on something we have plans to have somebody work on that when when that happens, you know

And I don't know what you just you just use the stable version. So you're using five point zero point two Okay, so if you know one of the goals of keycat if you're not aware is I make it really strict point about making the nightly builds as you as Stable as possible. We don't like i'm not like let's just dump everything into the repo and let's go and nothing works

Um, I we don't do that and I never let that happen and I don't know that I ever will so Because if you want people to really help you test You have to have a reasonably usable nightly build And so A lot of people in fact at work I use I always keep a stable installed in case something goes wrong

But I pretty much use nightly builds every every one at my job Yes

Okay, you're free router you're okay the question was what

The question was what happened to the free router button? The reason the free router button went away is because basically that interface that we used for free router went away You can still use it, but you have to it's a manual operation right now the old interface you have to actually Used to be able to there was actually a website link That when you clicked on it, it would actually take you to the free router the one on the one through your browser

and um, you know, it would do the uh, it would export the um, the uh the spectra Dsn file and then upload it and then you could it was automatic that that interface is going now. So we You have to do it manually you just have to go export the spectra directly and then you can just open up you can run

You get the jvm and you can just run Um free router locally instead of through the web interface. It's That's why that's why that went away. Okay. Sorry guys. We need to move on with the program. Uh, What's that somebody there you go somebody wrote a python screen that's why we have a scripting language. So, okay. Let's thank wane again

Thank you