The Contextual Electronics Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Zack Freedman is a prototyping engineer turned YouTuber who makes bombastic videos about 3D printed creations and getting projects across the finish line. He joins Chris to talk about his past hardware designs and what he will be building next.

Welcome, Jon Evans of the KiCad project! Jon Evans is a longtime developer on the KiCad project and practicing EE at Formlabs. He joins Chris to talk about the future of KiCad, including features that are coming in V6. Show Notes 0:00 Introduction 2:15 Making changes to the platform 4:00 History of the codebase - Chat with the KiCad team about V6 and beyond 5:05 Jon's work background - Jon works for Formlabs 8:20 What is coming in KiCad v6? 10:45 Working with legacy code in KiCad 13:30 Looking at an example project 14:50 Schematic editor 18:50 Changes to the schematic UI 21:00 Layout tool 22:45 Changes to the layout UI 24:10 The split of beginner vs advanced users 25:55 The benefits of an open source tool 26:25 Comparison to tools that are cloud based 27:45 The KiCad ecosystem 30:45 KiCad Professional Services 32:00 KiCon 2021 33:10 What is DRC? How is it changing? 37:40 The challenges of live DRC 40:15 Example of DRC 46:05 New python API 48:30 Example project for using python scripting with KiCad 50:00 How the KiCad project works with feature requests 52:15 Working with the console inside KiCad 53:55 What else is Jon excited about in V6? 56:20 KiCad as a professional tool? 1:00:05 Following Jon online 1:02:10 Conclusion Other links: Follow Jon on Twitter KiCad User Forum KiCad Discord KiCad Twitter Thank you for supporting The Contextual Electronics Podcast! Here's how you can follow and help us grow: Please follow us on social media: @ContextualElec on Twitter Contextual Electronics on Facebook Contextual Electronics on LinkedIn @Chris_Gammell on Twitter Please consider leaving us a review iTunes page for subscribing and reviewing   Video version of the podcast: Audio version  

Kat Scott of Open Robotics joins Chris to talk about how to create high complexity robotic creations and also how to create the lower level electronics that integrate into larger ROS systems. Kat is also a member of OSHWA, which defines and certifies Open Source Hardware.

Becky Stern mixes electronics, crafts, and practical applications to create interesting products and projects. She talks with Chris about her library of work and how to get started pairing electronics with something other than plastic boxes.

Conservify is creating the FieldKit, a new modular system for environmental monitoring for research scientists and citizen scientists. The engineering team joins Chris to talk about deploying measurement systems into harsh environments and how to make things that last.

Timon (@timonsku) joins Chris to talk about his experience creating low volume products at low cost (two things not normally associated). His experience building technical exhibitions, and more recently CM4 boards, gives him the experience to offer Chris some suggestions on reducing the cost of the ABC board.

In this episode, Mike Cheich (Programming Electronics) and Phil FitzGerald (The Compelling Message) talk with Chris about how to learn and teach electronics. This discussion also covers how to construct your own electronics learning journey, so you can get to your destination faster and learn how to create the custom electronics you'd like to build.

Joe Barnard joins Chris to talk about building scale model rockets and using thrust vector control to try and land those rockets like SpaceX does. This is an ongoing rocketry and video experiment you can follow and watch on BPS.Space!

Sarah Petkus is an artist and a maker who combines illustration, electronics, 3D printing, and softgoods design to bring her visions to life.

Roy Chen, Field Application Engineer (FAE) for Quectel, joins Chris to talk about the cellular module design on the ABC board (part of Contextual Electronics). This acts as an insight into the relationship between engineers and FAEs.