Development Highlights

The KiCad project recently merged the Eeschema modern canvas code into the development branch. This represents a significant change in the way the schematics and symbols are rendered by using the same modern canvas code used in Pcbnew. The schematic and symbol editing tools will not use the advanced tool framework used in Pcbnew so there will be no new editing features such as advanced selection, snapping, etc. The advanced tool framework features will be introduced into Eeschema during version 6 development.

The KiCad project recently merged the symbol library table code for accessing symbol libraries into the master branch. This represents a significant change in the way symbol libraries are defined and accessed. It is similar in design and function of the footprint library table and will resolve the long standing issue with symbol library ordering in Eeschema along with some new features such as platform independence and lazy library loading.

The KiCad project is proud to announce the support for importing Eagle projects. This is the outcome of work to complete the Eagle schematic file plugin and integrate it with the Eagle board file plugin. From the new "Import Project" menu entry in the KiCad launcher users may now select an Eagle schematic or board file and the new project name and location, after which the corresponding Eagle files will be imported respectively into EEschema and PcbNew.

After almost 15 months in development and testing, the new 3DViewer developed by Mario Luzeiro has been merged with the product branch in revision 6985 http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kicad-product-committers/kicad/product/revision/6985 and has since been available in the nightly builds of KiCad. This viewer was written entirely from scratch and takes advantage of the 3D plugin system to provide visualization of all 3D model formats supported by available 3D plugins. Features include: Two new render targets: OpenGL (GPU accelerated), and ray tracing with post-processing effects.

Seasoned KiCad users are familiar with the venerable 3DViewer tool which has traditionally been used to help verify design by visual inspection and to create images of what a project may look like when it is finished. Historically the 3DViewer could only process a very limited implementation of the VRML2 (aka VRML97) specification as produced by the Wings3D modeler. In the past two years various developers contributed support for VRML1 and a very limited implementation of X3D, which improved the support for VRML generated by FreeCAD.

In the spirit of providing insight on KiCad’s development, this report covers some of the development work within July and August. There are many patches that have been applied and this post will only summarize some of them, this is in no way meant to discourage small patches). Stable release Work continues towards a "stable" release for 2015. It is taking longer than desired to reach a "stable" point however many developers do this in their limited spare time.