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Those looking for a new tool for electronic design automation (EDA) have a fresh option to investigate, with the news that open source LibrePCB has reached the milestone of a 1.0 release. Harness Assembly
"After a few weeks of testing the RC1 and bugfixing, finally the stable release of LibrePCB 1.0 is finished and available for download," lead developer and project maintainer U. Bruhin writes of the milestone release. "One of the goals of this release was to get rid of several limitations which made LibrePCB 0.1.x unsuitable for many PCB projects."
Bruhin launched the LibrePCB project in 2017, with the goal of creating an easy-to-use application for electronic design automation — particularly circuit board design — across Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Apple macOS devices. Its first release, LibrePCB 0.1.0, came in 2018, but while the project showed promise it lacked in certain areas.
It's the resolution of these issues which has given cause for Bruhin to bump the version to 1.0.0 — indicating that the project is considered feature-complete for the first time. Among the changes in the new release include the addition of blind and buried vias, required for more complex multi-layer designs, keepout zones, fiducials, automatic stop mask and solder paste on pads, plated and non-plated slots, thermal relief pads, and rounded and custom footprint pad shapes.
The new release also brings with it a 3D viewer, rendering all parts of the PCB design — including copper layers, solder resist, silkscreen, and components — in a live view. "In addition," Bruhin adds, "the whole PCB can be exported as a STEP model so it can be opened in a mechanical CAD. Since your existing projects do not contain any 3D models yet, initially only the plain PCB will be rendered without any devices on it. To get the devices appearing, you need to add 3D models to the corresponding packages in your libraries."
The new release now includes better handling of manufacturer part numbers (MPNs) in the bill of material, variant part specification, and the ability to output Gerber production files as a single ZIP archive — all of which should, its creators hope, make the software easier to use for larger and more complex board design projects.
More information on the new release is available on the LibrePCB blog; the latest version of the software can be found on the project's GitHub repository, where the source code is made available under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.
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