Prolog
I’ve been using KiCad now since 2007 (I guess) while starting with electronics. During the last decade working in electrical engineering I profited a lot from KiCAD, using it for professional projects and my PhD studies. I want to give back to KiCAD and improve its power at the same time.
Problem statement
I specialized in my PhD in Power Electronics, requiring a complex clearance tool. This is currently not implemented. Therefore, industry uses here Eagle or Altium for power converter design. In my personal point of view, that’s the only point stopping KiCAD from beeing “that PCB software”.
According to the KiCad roadmap (and Seth) the DRC will be generalized. A clearance matrix has been requested far often, also one time by myself 3 years ago. To give you an overview over the request, here comes a list to the first three items i found (list is incomplete, and there are far more requests):
The idea
I talked to KiPro Team, and they would be willing to develop this feature. Their offer would be 10 kUSD to 15 kUSD which sounds like a fair offer to me, as it’s a big feature. Seth promises fixed delivery times. Beeing a just finished PhD I have limited resources. I could give 1 kUSD. But as also a lot of other people requested this feature, my idea was to team up and crowdfund this together. Maybe some guys of you have made a fortune using KiCad and are looking for a good way to give back to KiCAD.
Discussion
What do you think of this idea?
Would you give to a crowdfunding campaign?
Has somebody every organized a crowdfunding camping?
I would like if a charity organisation could do the management, so the givers can put it to the tax.
Trivia
Trolls, please keep out. This is a too serious topic.
Please bare in mind, I’m not a native English speaker
Thats my same situation. Power electronics struggling with lack of clearance matrix.
I upvoted all bug/feature reports regarding this in launchpad, but crowdfunding would be a great way to speed it up!
I just finished my PhD, also in power electronics (looking for job right now). I could help as alpha/beta user to report specific issues of the feature, as I have being doing to Nightly but now focused in Power Electronic layouts.
As far I now, @kasbah keeps a Open Collective Funding of Kitspace serve that we use to run KiCost. Maybe he could give some tip to you.
+1 from me too. Much missed feature not only for Power -Electronics. Its also very usefull when designing Test and Measurement equipment. Anthing with isolated islands and medical instruments.
This feature missing, is IMHO the biggest issue of KiCAD at the moment.
How did you come up with that number? Opencollective fees are 10% plus payment processor fees (2.9% + $0.20). I think it’s about the same as Kickstarter? At least here 5% are going to a non-profit (Opensource Collective). If you set up your own host (not sure how much work it is) the total fees are 5% plus payment processor fees. Still quite a lot but not as bad as you say.
If you are willing to self-host I am sure you could save on these fees but you have to put in more work as well.
Maybe the best thing to do would be first to reach out to @orsonmmz and others at CERN and speak to the Linux Foundation. Both of these organisations accept donations for the KiCad project and are linked to from kicad.org (click “donate” in the header bar).
The page you link to does not justify any of the numbers you quote. I couldn’t find any other page on the web site that would justify them either. You haven’t “explained” anything, it looks like you just made up some numbers, and you are spreading false information. Please stop doing that.
opencollective takes 10%, payment processor inbound takes 10% and outbound takes 5.5%. (this is at $5 level, but it’s not much different even for $100.)
Instead of accusing of spreading false information you could have just asked how did he find or calculated that information and told you couldn’t find that same information from there. No need to be hostile before friendly discussion first.
We should always assume good things of other forum users and only after fair trial judge them. Othewise this won’t be a good place to be for anyone.
But really guys, if you have to show something you saw somewhere on the web, just provide a screen shot and the actual page URL, not the top level site. It’s not hard.
I currently work for a small consumer product outfit and we’re designing 36V battery powered products with up to 1kW inverters.
We exclusively use KiCad, as it is so good, and your proposed functionality would be very useful. If you do end up taking donations, I’ll do my best to get a reasonable donation together. We certainly owe KiCad a lot.
