Powered by the Open Source Community ideas KiCAD is leading with new useful features which are missing even in the high end paid “professional” CAD products

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KiCAD got a lot of attention from Open Source and Maker community after Eagle was bought by Autodesk and moved to paid subscription model. This definitely was the most silly idea for CAD tool monetarization as on practice make all projects designed with Eagle owned by Autodesk and they can cut you from using them at any point they decide.

We know that in Open Source community size is vital for the project development. KiCAD obviously gained lot of community for the last two years and this starts to pay off.

Two weeks ago one interesting project was released:

Interactive HTML BOM generation plugin for KiCad EDA

Very useful tool for people who build prototypes it shows interactively where every part from the BOM to be placed on the board.

We didn’t have time even to check it while new amazing project is released:

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uConfig

This tool create KiCAD components by extracting the component info from PDF datasheet. Just imagine how much time this will spare when create 300-400 pin BGA component.

With such rapid development KiCAD is becoming leader with unique features which are missing the other paid “professional” CAD EDA products.

This once again proves the advantages of community driven Open Source development – the products become just better as many people think and develop together.