Great discussion, looks like things are heading to a healthy outcome, even if that is “nothing, for now”. For those looking to contribute, I thought this might help guide. This is the internal reference I created for my team of EEs to get started with KiCad. Some common themes are reflected:
Here are the recommended resources for getting started with KiCad.
- The official docs are up to date, thorough, and offer guidance as well as facts. However, I suggest they’re not the most interesting way to get started, so would recommend you only use them as reference: Documentation | KiCad and Getting Started in KiCad | 5.1 | English | Documentation | KiCad
- The best introduction is probably the one by Rene on the forum. Rene is a very regular contributor with a heap of practical knowledge. If you follow his guide from top to bottom you’ll get a good overview and a bit of practice with the important elements. Tutorial: Introduction to PCB design with KiCad version 5.1 (Getting Started)
- I have to mention Chris Gammell, who’s also a very prolific community member and does a lot of KiCad education. His “Getting to Blinky” course is the best example, but it’s really for people new to electronics, not just KiCad, so may not be right for you. But it is visual, which is great for learning software, so for reference here it is: Getting to Blinky 5.0
- There’s a surprising lack of “KiCad for those that know Altium” introductions out there. For me the big cognitive shifts to make are:
a. “selecting” a item is not a big deal - just hover and hit the shortcut key; and,
b. symbols and footprints are in separate libraries; and
c. you do not have to pick a part before you drop a symbol on the schematic! To me this is the separate content from formatting philosophy that systems like LaTeX and Confluence and Write! and CSS have leveraged. It can be really powerful, so try not to fight it from the beginning.- Once you know the basics, our KiCAD Workflow is a powerful collection of conventions and checklists that constrain the dizzying freedom that the tool offers into some processes that work for us. This is particularly true around BOM management - the tools let you do pretty much whatever you want, so we’ve narrowed that down into a system that limits some of the chaos and inefficiency that comes with so much freedom.
- Note that v5 was a big step forward for KiCad - if you’re following guides online, make sure they’re for v5. v6 is due out later this year and it looks like it’ll be a ripper. The forum and IRC channels are very helpful, and the developers are amazingly responsive. The software is very extensible via Python, the file format is plain text, and so there’s a good chance that if something needs improving, it will be, one way or the other.
One of our guys ended up putting together a ~90 minute presentation of him walking through the creation of a fictional design. It was excellent, and accelerates learning all those little tricks of usage and potential frustrations that are hard to convey in text. But alas, we didn’t record it. And video is so hard to correct/update/maintain/search/expand/do anything other than linear consumption.