EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => KiCad => Topic started by: s8548a on July 03, 2018, 05:16:21 am
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KiCad 5.0.0-rc3 has been released this week.
Download:
Windows:
http://downloads.kicad-pcb.org/windows/nightly/ (http://downloads.kicad-pcb.org/windows/nightly/)
OSX:
http://downloads.kicad-pcb.org/osx/nightly/ (http://downloads.kicad-pcb.org/osx/nightly/)
Linux:
http://kicad-pcb.org/download/ (http://kicad-pcb.org/download/)
Bug Reporting:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/ (https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/)
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Hmm, RC3 sounds optimistic. I may give it a shot for a small board.
Has anybody already tried it?
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Hmm, RC3 sounds optimistic. I may give it a shot for a small board.
Has anybody already tried it?
Well, the RC was tagged yesterday. But, I've been using Kicad nightlies for a couple of years now, and I had a couple of boards built last month using whatever was the most-recent nightly at the time. The boards work as designed.
It's eminently usable.
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It's eminently usable.
and what would be the top-3 or so features in 5.0 that would make me want to switch from 4.0.7 ? :-\
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Can the new version be installed along side the old v4 stable version?
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Yes, with a little effort.
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It's eminently usable.
and what would be the top-3 or so features in 5.0 that would make me want to switch from 4.0.7 ? :-\
A few of them covered here:
https://forum.kicad.info/t/when-will-kicad-5-be-available/8563/13
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Woohoo!
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Woohoo!
excuse my ignorance and laziness but is there a video or image-sequence somewhere of how wonderful via-stitching is in 5.0? thanks!
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Can the new version be installed along side the old v4 stable version?
New features in V5 footprints like arbitrary shaped pads and rounded rectangle pads were not backward compatible.
and it has covered in detail here:
https://forum.kicad.info/t/does-v5-have-to-overwrite-on-install/11282
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Can the new version be installed along side the old v4 stable version?
Nope. The version isn't part of the library path and the v5 library can't be used with v4.
Also, your project will need to be converted, but that's easily managed with git or whatever in case you need to roll back.
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I wrote up the procedure for installing v5 with v4 on Windows here https://github.com/bobc/kicad-doc/wiki/Installing-KiCad-v4-and-v5-side-by-side I'm sure that the same thing can be achieved on most Unix systems, if not MacOS.
I should add the caveat that once you save a project using v5, it becomes more or less difficult to go back and edit the same project in v4.
The default official libraries for the v5 release will be quite different to the v4 libs, and you can't use the v5 libs in KiCad v4. However, you can use KiCad v5 with the v4 libraries.
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Can the new version be installed along side the old v4 stable version?
You won't want to go back to the 4.0. The new stuff is really a lot better.
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I really like that I can just drop a component onto a wire have it automatically connect it and trim the wire. Also, the automatic connection management was long overdue. And schematic wire management is greatly improved; you no longer get a ton of little segments, with potential connection (wires and pins one iota apart) issues, and they automatically recombine into single wires. This is basic functionality that you don't think of that mostly just works and when it doesn't it's just a pain in the rear. In v5 it's been a long time for me since ERC came up with anything disconnected, well, that wasn't an actual omission.