But if you’re new to KiCad, now’s a great time to jump in. If you’ve been doing the same, version 4.0 may not have all that much new for you. Indeed, there are so many improvements that have been made over the last two and a half years, that everybody we know has been using the nightly development builds of KiCad instead of the old stable version. The 3D board rendering has also greatly improved. If you’re doing a board where timing is critical, KiCad 4.0 has a bunch of differential trace and trace-length tuning options that are something far beyond the last release.
But when you need the push-and-shove feature, it’s awesome. The push-and-shove router still has some quirks, and doesn’t have all the functionality of the original routers, though, so we often find ourselves switching back and forth. We’ve been using various “unstable” builds of KiCad for the last two years just because of this feature, so it’s awesome to see it out in an actual release. We’re looking for a new demo video online, but this one from earlier this year will have to do for now. The most interesting change, from a basic PCB-layout perspective, is the push-and-shove router. The blow is softened by a “component rescue helper” but you’re still going to need to be careful if you’re still using old schematics with the new version. Unfortunately, this means that you’ll need to be a little careful with your projects until you’ve switched all the parts over. The official part footprint libraries changed their format sometime in 2014, and are all now hosted on GitHub in separate “.pretty” folders for modularity and ease of updating. If you’ve been using the old “stable” version of KiCad (from May 2013!), you’ve got a lot of catching-up to do. (Or maybe wait until the inevitable 4.0.1 bugfix version comes out.) If you’re a KiCad user, as many of us here at Hackaday are, you’ll be elated to hear that KiCad 4.0 has just been released! If you’re not yet a KiCad user, or if you’ve given it a shot in the past, now’s probably a good time to give it a try.
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