So way back when, after we announced that Maple was moving to a four-layer design, several of you suggested that we give KiCad a try. KiCad is open source under GPL, and (unlike the free version of Eagle) plays nicely with four-layer designs, which are both, you know, pretty good things, so we decided to give it a whirl for the design of Maple Native^[1].

Overall, it went pretty well – the software is reasonably intuitive and I didn’t encounter any huge blocking issues. The assorted “getting started” resources out there are pretty comprehensive. Obviously there are glitches and idiosyncrasies that take some getting used to. KiCad seems to have a large user community which was invaluable for dealing with problems beyond the level of the readily available documentation, but I found it to be pretty scattered which can make ferreting out solutions difficult.

One of my biggest annoyances was the way KiCad handles via connectivity to zones. If you’re trying to connect a trace to a power plane on another layer, you can’t simply place a via to the power plane. Before doing a zone fill on the power plane, you must go in and manually connect all the vias on the power plane layer to one another, and then to the zone fill, which essentially “covers” all the traces you just drew. It’s not a huge time sink, but I can’t think of any reason it’s a good idea to do it this way, and it took me a long time to figure out that yes, this is actually the way it’s supposed to work.

Hotkeys also gave me some grief. I’m running KiCad in an Ubuntu VM on a Mac (complete with silly little Mac chiclet keyboard and mouse) so a lot of the hotkeys didn’t work properly out of the box, and nobody seems to be able to get editing the hotkeys config file to work properly. Even lacking certain hotkeys routing was still reasonably painless, however, which is pretty impressive. The “hug traces” function is nice.

Setting drill sizes was also sort of obnoxious. There doesn’t appear to be a way to select a via and find out and/or edit what its drill size is. You can only choose to set it to default or alt, which means you can only have two possible drill sizes for vias, maybe…? And changing the default drill size seems to go back and change all the vias you’ve already placed, maybe…? To be honest by this point in the design process I had routing-brain a little too badly to figure out the software and ended up just editing the .drl file by hand which of course was a wee bit buggy. I’ll have to better figure out how KiCad handles drill sizes before we spin the next prototype, so if anyone has any tricks they want to share, please do.

So what about you guys? KiCad users, weigh in!

[1]: We’re getting a lot of inquiries about timeline for Maple Native, so I just want to reiterate: we’re chugging away as fast as we can, but we don’t feel comfortable committing to a release date just yet. We’ve got a prototype in our hot little hands, and right now we’re at the “basic functionality” stage of testing. One major item still on the to-do list is bringing up the FSMC bus for the memory chip, and then, you know, fixing the myriad problems with the board design that will undoubtedly come up during testing. Extrapolate from that as you will.