Introduction to KiCad for Circuit Design
In a previous article I introduced Ngspice as a popular open source circuit simulation tool. After some more time playing with circuits, I stumbled into KiCad, a popular open source tool for designing circuits.
KiCad focuses on design of schematics (diagrams that show components and how they are connected) and PCBs. On top of this, KiCad can integrate with Ngspice to run simulations on the schematics we design, making it an all-in-one tool for circuit design.
Installation
We can get the latest version of KiCad from their downloads page. Installing it in Ubuntu, is as easy as running these commands:
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sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kicad/kicad-7.0-releases
sudo apt update
sudo apt install kicad