Over the last few years, the options for designing your own custom electronics have been getting slim. Many paid products are shutting down, raising prices, or being consolidated into unattractive and expensive packages. Through all this KiCAD has been getting better and coming into its own through the latest stable releases. We’re Moving On From EAGLE CADLast year autodesk announced something everyone was anticipating, EAGLE would no longer be supported after 2026. While this gives us a long road to transition to other software, it’s made sense that we move on to more sustainable ECAD software. We already started using KiCAD on an inconsistent basis at the end of 2022, and as of recently we’ve made the decision to bring all our designs over to KiCAD to avoid any issues in the future availability of new and old designs.
We are an open source company after all, so it makes sense that we move in a direction that supports open source hardware and software well into the future. And while our contributions might be small now, we know that as time moves on those small contributions will add up. All of this for us to say that for the next few months, we will be contributing a portion of our sales to KiCAD! We believe in the future of open source and that future is reliant on open source tools that serve both hobbyist and professional needs. It is important that the companies that benefit most from open source tools give back. Either through contributions to the code base or through financial contributions. The way we intend to help is through financial contributions to KiCAD. As we mentioned, we will be donating a portion of all our sales to KiCAD. The contributions will be structured as a fixed amount in a tier of dollars spent by our customers. For every $25 before the cost of shipping spent, $2 will be set aside to donate to KiCAD. A $75 order will yield a $6 contribution to KiCAD. This means most every item sold in our shop will count towards contributions to KiCAD and the future of open source hardware/software. As our sales grow, there are a number of other initiatives in open source that we will want to start supporting financially. For now, we view this as the best path forward. It should be a great feeling knowing that every purchase of our products furthers the abilities of those world wide to be able to make with only the limits of their imagination. -Seth Kerr Owner/CTO Oak Dev Tech
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AuthorsSeth is embedded software engineer and open source hardware developer. Archives
March 2024
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