Kaspar Emanuel

The Kitspace BOM builder is a tool that tries to make it easy and fun to select parts for your electronics project by giving you all the information you need and automating everything that can be automated. This talk covers what it does, how to use it and how it is built.

A quick introduction to using the vector drawing tool Inkscape with the SVG2Shenzhen plugin to turn arbitrary drawings into PCB design layers in KiCad. No previous knowledge of PCB design, electronics or Inkscape required.

An overview and history of various tools and languages that allow you to use code rather than CAD software to design circuits.

For anyone used to expressing their ideas with code using a CAD tool to design electronics can be an even more frustrating exercise than normal. If you are a programmer thinking about getting into designing circuits or if you have ever thought "I could easily solve this with a for-loop" when using KiCad then this talk is for you.

We will cover the history of ideas of using code to describe electronic circuits and culminate in the presenter's own experiments in this area.

Open source electronics is only useful if you actually know how to make and assemble a given design. In this lightning talk Kaspar will walk through the build of an electronic circuit assembly: from ordering or making the board, getting the parts and soldering them on to get to a working project.

A session to discuss the current landscape for FOSS PCB design tools and possible paths moving forward.

1-click BOM is a browser extension that lets you easily buy required parts given a bill of materials. This was first presented at FOSDEM in 2015 and in this talk Kaspar catches us up on the progress since.

One of the most exciting bits to come out of this development is the project sharing site Kitnic.it: a registry for open source hardware that makes complete PCB designs easier to replicate.

The story of the development of these applications is a tour of the pains and joys of developing electronic design tools for the web with Javascript.

Footwork is an experimental KiCAD footprint (text) editor written in Racket. Footwork takes advantage of Lisp's code-data equivalence to offer a unique approach to PCB design: KiCAD's footprint format becomes a domain specific language embedded in the Racket programming language.

Footwork's interface is text first allowing users to make arbitrary edits: their requirements need not be fully anticipated by the user interface. The users still immediately see the effects of their edits through a graphical preview but can use a fully featured general purpose programming languages to generate and modify footprints.

Traditional (mouse based) manipulation is being added as calls to scripting. Most interestingly, Racket's Rosette language, an interface to SMT solvers, offers the opportunity to make use of cutting edge techniques in programming synthesis for design automation.

Panel discussion on PCB design tools.

1clickBOM is a browser extension that allows you to simple paste from spreadsheets or visit an online BOM and then quickly add those components to shopping carts. It takes the tedium out of shopping for electronic projects online without locking you into one vendor. This presentation is a short introduction to 1clickBOM and a discussion of the design decisions taken in making it.