Printing out the assembly plan and the BOM for manual PCB assembly and marking the assembled parts line by line is no longer required thanks to a new output job. Instead of a PDF, you’ll get the assembly plan as a HTML file which is interactive — you can sort, filter, search or mark parts as assembled using a web browser. Instead of a paper sheet, you could use your laptop or tablet on your desk while assembling the PCB step by step.

The HTML/CSS/JS core of this feature is from the existing Ineractive HTML BOM project, already well known as a KiCad plugin. In LibrePCB, this is now a built-in feature!

As KiCad v9 was released with some changes in its library file format, we updated our KiCad library importer to support that new file format. Of course older file formats are still supported, and actually their compatibility was even improved too in this release.

Though not directly relevant for our users, this change is still noteworthy as it highly affects the development of LibrePCB. After more than 10 years of implementing LibrePCB entirely in C++, this release contains the very first code written in the Rust programming language.

The reasoning behind this is explained in the blog post NGI0 Grant for LibrePCB 2.0. While this is not directly visible in the LibrePCB application, users still profit indirectly from potentially higher stability and faster development.

In this release, there are two software modules implemented in Rust: The interactive HTML BOM generator mentioned above, and the library for reading and writing ZIP files.

It’s not a secret that KiCad is the most popular EDA tool in the open-hardware community, and therefore many LibrePCB users worked with KiCad before. To help them getting started with LibrePCB, we implemented an importer for KiCad libraries so those already created library elements don’t need to be created again with LibrePCB.

In addition, even non-KiCad users could use this feature to import library elements from publicly available KiCad libraries instead of creating them manually. Thanks to the large KiCad community, there are a lot of such libraries! 😀

Drawing footprints can be error-prone — one wrong X- or Y coordinate of a pad and the package might not be solderable. To review your footprints more easily, the footprint editor allows you to set the package drawing from a datasheet as background image, so you’ll immediately see if any pad of polygon is off.

The image can either be directly captured as a screenshot, pasted from the clipboard, or loaded from a file:

Circuit design means reading datasheets a lot. For most parts more complex than a resistor or capacitor, you need to read its datasheet or other documentation.

Therefore the library editor now allows you to add datasheet URLs to components and devices. Those will then be available in the context menu in the schematic editor for easy access. In addition, parts which have an MPN & manufacturer specified also offer a Search datasheet menu item which will look for a datasheet in the Internet.

Whenever possible, datasheets are downloaded and opened with the local PDF reader. They are cached to keep them available without accessing the Internet again.

From time to time people ask whether LibrePCB contains an autorouter. Though there are different opinions about whether autorouters are useful or not, and even though LibrePCB still doesn’t have one built-in, luckily you can now use an external autorouter like Freerouting for LibrePCB boards!

This is possible by supporting the Specctra DSN/SES exchange format, which also allows routing a LibrePCB board manually with an external tool to circumvent the still rudimentary integrated trace routing tools.

In addition to the already mentioned features, there have been several more noteworthy features implemented which increase productivity a lot:

Thanks to a contribution from mi4code, LibrePCB on Windows now automatically uses a dark theme if Windows itself is set to a dark theme. Also for macOS and Linux (which already supported dark theme) there are some dark theme improvements and fixes.

Please note that for this release we had to make some changes to our deployment: