Automated building of schematic as well as pcb layout based on a domain specific language specification. You simply specify which input voltage, sensors,… you need, and the tool builds it for you. And they use KiCad as part of their system .
@kasbah: I think this is especially interesting for you because of your “Designing PCBs with code” talks
Oh wow. I’ve been building a similar system for laying out components, but this is a lot more advanced. Good on those guys for taking it to a more streamlined level. Kudos!
Ah nice, haven’t logged in here much so I didn’t see your @. I did come across it separately as well. Super interesting. I think electron-lang.org, created by the creator of PyCircuit, can be a completely open contender to this. Will continue to watch this space
I think schematic synthesis of digital circuits would be an achivable goal for KiCad. Targets to get this working would benefit “normal” users as well:
powerful DRC and constraints system (required to connect the building blocks in a valid way, specifying voltage, current, bus-system,…)
annotation support on symbols/pins/nets (when constrains are not enough, to give the synthesis tool additional informations)
… other things I missed
Digital circuits have the nice property of typical 1 MCU connected to various perepherie. A constrains solver should be able to create a valid collection of connected building blocks quite easily.
PCB synthesis is way more complicated and I wouldn’t care about that for now. (Autoplacer, Autorouter, Signal-Integrity,…)