LibrePCB 1.1.0 Released

Who didn’t already finish a PCB project and then — while ordering the parts — realized that several parts in the schematic are obsolete, not in stock or unexpectedly expensive? This is annoying and wastes time for evaluating new parts and adjusting the PCB layout again.

Luckily with LibrePCB 1.1.0 you now see much earlier in the design phase which parts are good to use! When adding new parts to a schematic, you’ll immediately see their lifecycle status, availability, price and more:

In addition, the BOM export dialog gives you an overview about the status of all parts used in the project and even shows you their total price:

Since such information can change quickly, it is not stored in our libraries but requested through our online API on demand. The actual data about parts is kindly sponsored by Partstack — without their support, it would not be possible for us to provide this feature.

Still using EAGLE and looking for alternatives now since it has been abandoned? Or already using LibrePCB, but still having many old EAGLE projects?

No problem — in addition to the already existing EAGLE library import, you can now even import whole EAGLE projects, allowing you to smoothly migrate from EAGLE to LibrePCB! Well, at least within some limitations since such importers by design can’t be lossless 😉 However, we think it works very well for many EAGLE projects so you should definitively give it a try.

For more details about its limitations, check out this pull request. If you encounter a problem not mentioned there, please let us know!

The most important step of creating a new device is to define its pinout, which can be quite cumbersome and error-prone, especially for devices with many pads. This changes with LibrePCB 1.1.0:

Any pads whose name match with a component signal (e.g. a connector with pads 1..20) can now be assigned with just a single click.

And for any remaining pads, an interactive mode helps you to do the assignment pad by pad. A filtering feature and extensive keyboard shortcuts make this mode very efficient.

This is actually just a small change, but thanks to theme-aware toolbar icons and improved colors, LibrePCB is now much better usable (and looks better) on systems with a dark theme.

Normally I don’t consider internal technical changes as a highlight, but this time a technical change has notable impact especially for Windows users. Starting with LibrePCB 1.1.0, we now support Qt6, the successor of the C++ toolkit Qt5 which LibrePCB is based on since its very beginning. Together with Qt6 we now provide 64-bit releases for Windows.

In addition, this new 64-bit release is now built with a new installer toolkit. Instead of downloading LibrePCB from the internet during the installation, this is now an offline installer not requiring internet anymore. Due to the different CPU architecture, the new installer defaults to the location C:\Program Files\LibrePCB instead of C:\Program Files (x86)\LibrePCB. During installation it will ask you to uninstall any previous LibrePCB version.

If you like LibrePCB, please consider making a small donation to support the ongoing development.
Thank you!