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Jon Evans

@craftyjon.com

software @kicad.org, hardware @formlabs Sadly not a sci-fi author Also at @craftyjon@chaos.social he/him

41 Posts305 Follower111 Folgt
David Lawrence@dlaw.me · 4mo ago

I'm excited and humbled to share that I will be presenting a session on "Real-Time Rust on Research Robots" at RustConf 2026 in Montreal. I hope to see some of you there!

Matt Keeter@mattkeeter.com · 2y ago

I've just announced my new (blazing-fast) kernel for implicit surfaces: mattkeeter.com/projects/fid... It's got something for everyone: Cool graphs! Multithreaded WebAssembly! Terrible mesh topology! JIT compilers! After three years, I'm excited to finally show it off to a wider audience 😎

Screenshot of a window showing two panes: on the left is a script, and on the right is a fidget spinnerA wireframe mesh of an architectural cross-sectionMarge Simpson, holding a squishy cube-sphere-intersection, with the caption "I just think they're neat!"
Jon Evans@craftyjon.com · 2y ago

KiCad 9 will visualize some DRC errors in a more clear way. Shown here is a new creepage test, which particularly benefits from this. Thanks to Fabien Corona for these two additions.

A screenshot of the KiCad PCB editor in a recent nightly build, showing a creepage violation in the DRC dialog as well as the actual creepage path that was calculated.
Jon Evans@craftyjon.com · 2y ago

KiCad 9 will also come with a ton of smaller tweaks and quality-of-life improvements, like this Chamfer feature added by John Beard:

Jon Evans@craftyjon.com · 2y ago

A new feature coming to the schematic editor in KiCad 9: rule areas, contributed by James Jackson. These allow you to do things like assign net classes to a number of nets at once (even if the nets are not themselves named)

A screenshot of the schematic editor in a KiCad nightly build, showing a rule area assigning the netclass RAM_ADDR to a set of 8 net wires
Jon Evans@craftyjon.com · 2y ago

KiCad 9 also will bring the selection filter to the schematic and symbol editors. This adds another workflow to edit multiple things in bulk (for example: set the filter to Pins, hit Ctrl+A to select all pins, and edit their properties in the Properties Panel)

Screenshot of a KiCad nightly build showing the symbol editor and schematic editor windows, with the properties panel attached to the left of the graphical editing canvases and the new selection filter appearing below the properties panel
Jon Evans@craftyjon.com · 2y ago

Another nice feature coming to #KiCad 9: The Zone Manager, contributed by Ethan Chien. This dialog lets you quickly check and re-arrange the fill order (priority) of all the copper zones in a board, and includes a graphical preview so you can more easily tell what zone you have selected.

A screenshot of the Zone Manager dialog in KiCad nightly, showing a copper zone's properties, a graphical preview of the zone fill, and a re-orderable list of zone priorities
Jon Evans@craftyjon.com · 2y ago

KiCad 9 also adds the ability to mark a track on an outer layer as having no soldermask. You could do this before by copying the shapes to the mask layer, but this is much faster. Thanks to Andrzej Wolski for contributing this feature.

Screenshot of KiCad showing a copper track with soldermask removed, in the 2D and 3D views
Jon Evans@craftyjon.com · 2y ago

Another thing coming to KiCad 9 is custom padstacks. While you've been able to completely remove unconnected pads from a layer in recent versions, sometimes the situation calls for different shapes or sizes within the same pad. I'm looking forward to having this flexibility.

Screenshot of KiCad 3D viewer, showing several through-hole pads with different shapes on 4 different copper layers