KiCad 5 Officially Released

Community
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The KiCad project is proud to announce that version 5 has officially been released. See the release announcement on the KiCad website. The KiCad development team hopes you enjoy the latest version of KiCad.

Cheers,

Wayne

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Enjoy an adult beverage (or a dozen) :sunglasses:) for all of your hard work!

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The Windows Download page is now going to confuse new users by still having a separate section for “Old Stable” which is actually 2013 and hiding 4.0.7 in “Previous Releases”.
I would put that the other way round and try to hide 2013 except for archeological purposes.

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Good idea, fixed now.

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Three cheers for the dev team!

Also pointing out that people on this forum can help contribute to the next release by donating via CERN! Please consider contributing to the next round of features!

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I pointed my boss at the donation page and will probably throw a few bucks KiCad’s way personally!

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So did I, me and some colleagues are donating our wage of some work hours and my boss is doubling the final amount as a combined company donation

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The money gauge is currently at 19%, but the hour counter is displaying “38 hours completed so far” only. So, even with 100% money, it can’t reach the 600 hours mark… I probably miss something.

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I also made my donation. Realy wondering when v6 will be released if the 600 hours mark is passed ? Anyone know how many developers will be put on the job at CERN ?

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I think the 600 hours are the fundraiser goal not the estimate for how much work v6 will be.

Of course they could release some thing after 600 hours and call it a day. This will however not be anything near what we expect v6 to be.

If the past is any indicator then we can expect v6 two years after 5.1 (not after 5.0.0! the next big change is to get kicad to run with python support on linux again. This will also take a lot of time and effort. Therefore the need for a smallish release focusing on that before v6 development really starts)

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A post was split to a new topic: Moving from Python to Lua

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Awesome work! Every one of you devs has worked hard on hundreds, if not thousands of different aspects of KiCAD. From bug fixes to feature requests, it sure is great to have you all working on such a great project.

I’m trying to get my work to move to KiCAD from Eagle. When that happens, I’ll push the owner to match contributions like Shack. :smile:

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V5 rocks and everyone should donate! If they really want to get the funds rolling in, though, they should sell those “Never trust the autorouter” shirts - I’d buy one!

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They already do (sort of). See KiCAD Apparel at Contextual Electronics

(That’s not the only source, but it seems to be the one that directly supports KiCAD development. “Never Trust the Autorouter” )

Dale

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Thanks, purchased! I was mightily tempted by the Widlar poster and “solder jockey” shirt as well :slight_smile:

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Just bought one from there… wish it came in something with a collar (work dress code).

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This is great. So can you have both v4.07 and v5 installed at the same time? And are the file formats backward compatible, so that you can just open up your old projects in v5 and everything “just works”. There probably is a readme I’m overlooking with this info.

Thanks,
Greg

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Mostly note that all the libraries got renamed in the upgrade but your footprints already in your project are embedded in it.

You can export them out into your own custom library if you choose or just leave them as they are embedded in the project. Alternatively you can remap to the new libraries.

Me personally I don’t need 4.07 installed with my projects but the rendering of the OpenGL canvas and selection is still a bit awkward compared to the 4.0.7 legacy canvas I can certainly work in it and there are lots of new features but it doesn’t feel smooth yet.

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This would be forward compatible. Backwards compatible would mean you can open a file made by v5 and you can open it in v4.

If kicad is forward compatible might be debatable. As opening a v4 schematic in v5 is not possible without remapping it.
Remapping means adding additional information such that kicad knows from which library each symbol comes from. (In kicad 4 the first lib with a symbol of a given name was chosen. This meant symbol names needed to be unique over all libs or the user needed to take care of library priorities.)

Yes. But depending on what your operating system is this can get quite involved.
In short you would need to set the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME of your v5 installation such that it uses a different config storage location than v4.
More details see:

Another option is using a virtual machine setup for running the version of kicad you do not use that often.

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