The race for Mayor of the Community Path grows heated.

The FAA is a dumpster fire when it comes to mental health. This is an amazing and heartbreaking video by @xylafoxlin.bsky.social speaking up about her experience and the struggle of mental health in the aviation community. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj0H...

OK, it's official on the website now: KiCad 9 is out! www.kicad.org/blog/2025/02...

I've been building a new API for #KiCad for the past year, and we're getting ready to release the first version of it with V9 at the end of the month!

I've just announced my new (blazing-fast) kernel for implicit surfaces: mattkeeter.com/projects/fid... It's got something for everyone: Cool graphs! Multithreaded WebAssembly! Terrible mesh topology! JIT compilers! After three years, I'm excited to finally show it off to a wider audience 😎

The KiCad project is excited to announce the first release candidate for the next major version is available for testing. Version 9.0.0 is expected to be released by 01/31/25. New features can be found here forum.kicad.info/t/post-v8-ne... Packages are available www.kicad.org/download/

The first release candidate for #kicad 9 is available! More info over on the forum: forum.kicad.info/t/stable-ver...

What KiCad features are the most mysterious to you?

KiCad 9 will visualize some DRC errors in a more clear way. Shown here is a new creepage test, which particularly benefits from this. Thanks to Fabien Corona for these two additions.

Multi-track drifting, er, dragging coming to KiCad 9! Video and code courtesy of Tom W :)

Giving Tuesday – KiCad open-source design #GivingTuesday 💻🔧🌍❤️🤝 #electronics

KiCad 9 will also come with a ton of smaller tweaks and quality-of-life improvements, like this Chamfer feature added by John Beard:

A new feature coming to the schematic editor in KiCad 9: rule areas, contributed by James Jackson. These allow you to do things like assign net classes to a number of nets at once (even if the nets are not themselves named)

KiCad 9 also will bring the selection filter to the schematic and symbol editors. This adds another workflow to edit multiple things in bulk (for example: set the filter to Pins, hit Ctrl+A to select all pins, and edit their properties in the Properties Panel)

Another nice feature coming to #KiCad 9: The Zone Manager, contributed by Ethan Chien. This dialog lets you quickly check and re-arrange the fill order (priority) of all the copper zones in a board, and includes a graphical preview so you can more easily tell what zone you have selected.

KiCad 9 also adds the ability to mark a track on an outer layer as having no soldermask. You could do this before by copying the shapes to the mask layer, but this is much faster. Thanks to Andrzej Wolski for contributing this feature.

Another thing coming to KiCad 9 is custom padstacks. While you've been able to completely remove unconnected pads from a layer in recent versions, sometimes the situation calls for different shapes or sizes within the same pad. I'm looking forward to having this flexibility.

#KiCad 9 will have a native multichannel feature! (video by Tom W)

Hey Folks! We're getting close to tagging 8.0.7 for release. You can help test for bugs by using an 8.0 testing release and reporting any issues. As a bonus, you get all the older bugs fixed. downloads.kicad.org/kicad/window... downloads.kicad.org/kicad/macos/... launchpad.net/~kicad/+arch...

If you are into product engineering, this is a great video. Going over many small design decisions and problems and how stuff gets manufactured. Also perfect example why design files by themselves do not enable product clones. They could fully open source this and still no one could just clone it.

Booked my trip to #FOSDEM 2025! Always enjoy getting to hang out with other KiCad developers and users in-person :)