kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,
This is my first post to this list, so let me introduce myself. In my
day-life I am a software engineer working on big C++ programs; in my
free time I am a maker of all kinds of things, part of it is
electronics, mostly digitally. From multi-terabyte RAM in a
distributed system to 128 byte RAM in a microcontroller - all provide
their own fun and challenges.

I have used eagle for my PCB-needs ever since it was available on DOS
(uh, that might've been somewhere in the 80ies/early 90ies), and the
availability later on Linux made me keep using it, but using a closed
source tool always made me feel icky.
So I revisited my choice and looked at kicad which seems like a very
nice alternative indeed.

Of course, there are things to improve, and this is where I'd like to
contribute. My main pain point right now is the integration of
components and their packages (e.g. when moving to a board, manually
choose footprints with no clear default association) I'll have to play
around a bit with it though to come up with concrete ideas. In general
a more 'smooth' integration between the different tools would probably
be nice.
Anyway, since I am probably not the only one, I'd like to know if
someone is working on this area. Maybe goals are discussed or
described somewhere ? The main kicad site seems to be down right now,
so excuse me if I ask something obvious (I've seen for instance the
BIU change described in the source (biu-plan.txt), but haven't seen
other highlevel plans documented there).

I'll be travelling the next three weeks, so the next month or so, I'll
be mostly watching the mailing list, reading code etc. before I can
contribute something, one small patch at a time while learning the
code base.

cheers,
  -henner