KiCad-Parts-Features-Custom Design

Circuit Board Electronic Pcb

KiCad

Parts

The KiCad suite has five main parts:

• KiCad - the project manager.

• Eeschema - the schematic capture editor.

• Pcbnew - the PCB layout program. It also has a 3D view.

• GerbView - the Gerber viewer.

• Bitmap2Component - tool to convert images to footprints for PCB artwork.

Features

KiCad uses an integrated environment for all of the stages of the design process: Schematic capture, PCB layout, Gerber file generation/visualization, and library editing.

KiCad is a cross-platform program, written in C++ with wxWidgets to run on FreeBSD, Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Many component libraries are available, and users can add custom components. The custom components can be available on a per-project basis, or installed for use in any project. There are also tools to help with importing components from other EDA applications, for instance EAGLE. Configuration files are in well documented plain text, which helps with interfacing version control systems, as well as with automated component generation scripts.

Multiple languages are supported, such as English, Catalan, Czech, German, Greek, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovene, Swedish, and Chinese.