All right, as you all are taking your seats, thank you very much for joining us.
Welcome to the open hardware and CAD-CAM Devroom at POSDM-2026, almost at the wrong year.
They're okay, 2026.
We're just about to get started with a man who clearly needs no introduction because
I was just referring to him as Wayne for the last 15 minutes and everyone laughed and knew
what I was talking about.
Without too much further ado, we have Wayne, one of the founders and lead engineers of the
key CAD project.
Hello.
Okay, let's get started.
I apologize for being late for some reason.
I thought it was 240 was my start time, not 220.
So I apologize for being late.
Okay, most of you for here, you're probably here, you know, while you're here.
Everybody wants to hear about the key CAD project status and what's going on.
So let's get started.
Unfortunately, I have to start with bad news.
We're a little behind in 10 this year.
For the behind where we wanted to be, I was hoping we would tag RC-1 either today or yesterday,
but we had a last minute crash bond.
So until we fixed that.
But I expect RC-1 in the next couple days.
The goal is to definitely be done by the end of the month.
Normally, I think last year we missed it my two weeks, like 14, 12, 14 days.
We relate this year.
We're going to be a little bit past that.
So I do apologize for that.
We had a lot of new features and it's been a little, it's been a little bumpy getting rid of the serious bugs.
So it happens, but we will, we will get it out as quickly as can of this year as we can.
Because we want to start via 11 as soon as possible.
So the last nine, the last nine bug fix release was on January 1.
They'll probably one more of those yet.
Before 10 is released and then the nine branch will be dead.
That'll be a dead branch and 10 will be the development or the stable version going forward.
We got, our year v9, end of your campaign.
We raised $100,000 and 60K of that was from matching from other donors.
So that was nice.
We didn't make our 128 goals.
We have that as our goal again this year.
This year, because of everything else was late, we got that started late.
We only, that's only been open a couple weeks.
So we're hoping to raise $128K this year.
We did receive a 150K Euro and on that grant this year.
So in the previous couple of year grants, we got we're like 50K.
But we, they bumped us up to 150K and that money is going to pay for a whole lot of
features in V11.
Some of them, some of that money was allocated to V10.
But the way they're scheduling and our scheduling don't match very well.
So there's going to be some overlap.
For those of you who don't know, we now have key, key cons in the United States, Europe and Asia
and every year.
So if you're in one of these areas where there's a key con conference, please come join us.
There are a lot of fun.
There, you get to meet all of the key cad people that you want to meet ever meet.
I try to make all of them occasionally.
I have scheduling conflicts, but I've only missed one so far.
So we had the third one.
This year, I'm very welcome for those of you who are there.
You know, that was a lot of fun.
We also had our third one for China this year.
So the US one will be in San Diego again this year and should be for
hopefully we're still trying to get the finalized the dates, but should be in the middle
to late May.
So keep that in mind if you're in the States and you want to come to a key con,
a key cad conference.
We did manage to add eight new library team members.
I would like to say we added a whole bunch of new court team,
you know, the court team members, but we have not or developed any members.
But the team strong and we're doing well.
We have of course we have the three conferences annually so please come and join us.
And in terms of sponsors, we have three platinum went gold, five silver, nine bronze sponsors.
So we added quite a few new sponsors in the last last year.
And we always like to shout out our platinum sponsors because that's 15K a year or more.
Watch you next PCB, key cad services corporation and PCB way.
There are big donors.
So what's up with the version 10?
There's a list.
I know it's going to be fast and kind of abbreviated because there's so much this year
that even more than probably v9.
So there's now a set up wizard.
So when the first time you start key cad on a clean install,
you're going to get a nice little walk through to help you get it set up.
Instead of you having to go figure out how to set it up.
One of the things that we requested is kind of came as part of that was
chain library table.
So in the past, you could only add libraries as standalone libraries.
Now you can add an entry in library table.
That's just another library table.
So it helps make your tables more portable.
And they can be nested as deeply as you want.
So that's going to be helpful.
You can now create a raise by selection order.
If you watch this a little quick demo, it's kind of clever.
You can you can select things by order.
And then you can create an array by them.
This is a helper tool that I believe is both in the schematic editor and the board editor.
And you notice it's in your you're creating your array from the schematic editor.
And then you're.
You're going to rearrange the array in the board editor.
We now have hatch fills for every kind of shape.
Not sure if that's a big thing or not, but you can now have fill any.
Or any random arbitrary polygon with hatch filling.
If you want to.
Before the table rotation was limited to 90 degrees if somebody requested that.
So apparently it's important.
You have your table.
Your table rotated to some odd.
Oh, that angle.
So you can write.
There's now a project importer for.
Altium users.
So in the past, you had to do this kind of two piece.
Two step process where you imported the board and the schematic separately.
And then you had to sync everything together because keycad has a different internal.
A global unique idea mapping.
Then all TMC it was kind of cumbersome.
There's now an all team importer.
So you just select either the schematic or the project file.
And it just imports it and does all that for you in one step.
So I know there's a lot of people that have been.
Not happy with all team recently.
So I know people have been looking our way for a solution.
So there it is.
Can now customize your toolbar layouts.
They're not fixed anymore.
So you can rearrange them.
Put whatever you want on your main toolbar.
Whatever tools you find.
Most helpful.
They're now.
They're not fixed anymore.
So if you don't like 90 degree cursors or full cursors,
you can now get a 45 degree cursor.
It's not one of those things.
It actually does kind of help because a lot of times things are like this.
You know, laid out 90 degree.
So the 45 degree course course cursor kind of unhides things.
Where the 45 degree cursor will be over top of something.
I do think I find that very useful.
But I think I can see that.
So now we have undo and redo and dialogue.
So if you edit things and dialogues and you go,
I don't want to do that.
I can take control Z it undoes in the dialogue.
And then control why to redo it or whatever you have it mapped to.
I'm just using the defaults there.
Don't panic.
There's now free form blasts.
They're selecting all the editors.
So you can draw an arbitrary polygon and select.
Instead of just the, you know, right now we only had the,
the enclosed select and then the greedy select.
Where anything intersecting the select depending on which direction you go.
You can now evaluate any text, any arbitrary text expression.
So you have these, you can do like math or anything else inside of a.
Inside of the text editor and it will do it for you.
It does the expression evaluation.
We added like all the, the font previewers now have.
They give you a preview of the font you're using before it was just,
this is the name of the font and kind of had to know what it was before you used it.
You can now just tell right a rectangle to be rounded.
Instead of having to draw draw four lines and four arcs.
To create a polygon that was around rectangle.
There's a whole bunch of new variables.
A lot of you who do complex designs use variable substitution.
We added a whole bunch of new variables.
This is the list of the new ones and what what they do.
There's an example there at what they, you know, in this particular example,
how they expand and what they expand to.
Libraries are now loaded in the background so you can down there you can see in the bottom.
In the past we've always waited to you needed to use a symbol library.
Like say pick up your in the schematic editor and you fired up the symbol chooser.
It would then load all the symbol libraries.
If you have even the just with the default libraries or libraries have gotten so big that you have to sit there.
Even on a fast machine, you have to sit there and wait a little bit till they're ready.
So that's it.
So while you first fired up key CAD starts to load, you're ready to go.
And we've designed the template selector.
So now when you say new project, it'll take you here first and the default template is the first one.
Instead of having two separate entries for new new libraries.
Schematics.
We can now we can now you can now create flat schematics, right?
You cannot multiple files at the root level for your priority key CAD everything had to be hierarchy.
That also helps with some of our importers because a lot of third party tools.
You can create flat and now we can import them.
Import them as you expect them to be.
Schematic variance.
This has been one of the biggest feature requests we've had for a long time.
You can now create bomb variance.
Simulation variance.
You can turn part of different parts of the simulation on and off for one variant.
There's a whole bunch of stuff in there.
It's really complex.
Go check it out.
It's pretty straightforward.
So like now when you output to the command line, you can include a variant name and it will create
whatever variance difference is between that and the default.
We've always had this kind of ugly hack that we did for stack pins.
You can now just define stack pins as a list of pins or a range and list of pins.
There's a syntax.
So you just create one pin.
You define all the pins that fall under that.
If you do a lot of really big FPGA chips, it's real handy because there might be a hundred
ground pins on the chip and you just need to put one pin in your symbol.
We now allow for profile symbol libraries.
In other words, right now the symbol libraries are all the symbols are in one file.
You can now save as and you can get one symbol profile.
Kind of like the footprint libraries.
Conversely, we have the opposite as well in the board editor.
Can have local sheet or sheet local power symbols now.
Historically, keypad power symbols are universal to the entire design.
Now you can have one in a sheet and it doesn't go out.
That power symbol doesn't go outside that sheet.
We now have a jumper support.
So, you know, jumpers are always one of those weird cases where you always have problems with
DRC's because they're not really.
Foot prints and symbols in the traditional sense, so now that we have the two
make Mary together so that we have a nice DRC.
You'll get some weird, you don't get weird DRC failures with jumpers.
We now support groups and the symbol editor so you can group things together.
Like you can in the board editor, create a group, give it a name.
We can import and export pin tables and concentrate value files.
So if you have like a big long.
A symbol with and you have the CVS file with all the pins stuff in it.
You can just suck it up into the symbol editor and it won't generate all the pins for you.
We added a whole bunch of new graphics or graph cursors for the simulator.
So before we only had, we were limited to just two.
Yeah.
What the heck happened to them?
All right.
So, I don't know what happened to my delete that by accident.
So, there's no object snapping.
So, when you get close to an object, it'll snap to it.
You'll get an indicator of what you're snapping to.
So, like end points.
So, it's a lot easier to do drawings in the.
And that's both in the schematic editor board editor.
Can we set all your pins to default on update?
One of the things the old update from library did was it just overwrote.
Or kept your old ones now you can reset.
Like if you have the alternate pins, it would keep the alternate.
Now you can just reset to default.
So we added the grouping of the symbols.
You can now, when you update your board, you can group.
Your footprint is by the groups that you have created in the symbol.
So in case you want to create little groups moving around together.
It's kind of handy.
We now have over wires.
So if you don't like your wires to cross, we make it the little hops.
We have a little hops now.
Oh, sorry.
That's break wire and can repeat.
So now you can break wires.
I'm sorry.
I got that backwards.
You can break wires like you can.
You can break traces on the board editor.
Here's the hop over.
We now support hop over.
Some people like it.
Some people, you know, it's an option.
You don't have to use it.
We're not forcing you to.
It's just there.
We now do the junction updates on drag.
When you do the orthogonal wire drag, you get the, you get the, you get the, the,
the junctions before it just would drag.
And then the junctions would show up after the drag.
Can drag and drop images now instead of having to import them.
Simple stuff.
But useful.
You know, it saves you time.
We now have unconstrained pinning gate swap.
And to explain what that means is.
You'll be able to pin and gate swap things that aren't pinning gate swap or bull for real.
That's what unconstrained means.
For version 11, we're going to work on the constraint version of that.
But right now, a lot of people want to be able to do it.
Use this carefully.
Very carefully.
We now have some ERC fix action.
So if you have any ERC error, it'll tell you how to fix it or automatically fix it for you.
If you have like a symbol that's off grid, you just say fix and it'll,
it'll put it on grid for you.
We have multiple simulation tuning plots.
I have sound with that.
So you can run a tune and see the effects.
I'm what you can run multiple plots.
You can see the effects of the.
The band then fall off there.
What do we're that think the sound came from?
Expanded selection.
So you can like, this is similar to what you have in the board.
I've already you pick one and you can keep expanding.
The selection keeps going and going and going.
It gets the next object and everything connected to it.
All right.
That was the, that was most of the board editor.
The schematic editor of the board editor similarly.
Dance.
You can always assign component classes in the schematic editor.
Now they've come over to the board editor.
There's also DRC rules that allow you to say, I want this DRC to apply to this component class.
Right.
So you can make like a set of nets.
A component class.
You can do some complex DRC just for those nets.
Not DRC for like a gives you a little bit more granularity for your DRCs.
You're custom DRCs.
We, we, we accidentally removed this from version nine.
We now have the measurement tools back in the footprint shoes are.
We, there's nothing to show here, but this was a big one we used to have differences in our,
our, our length, our length tuning code would always like if you did it from one place that we show a different length.
And if you did it somewhere else, that's all going now.
There's a, there's a single code base for all that and it's been greatly updated.
So historically, we've only allowed you to do a match length tuning on my length.
Now we can do it by skew delay, right.
You can just type a time in there and it'll calculate.
Excuse me, calculate the skew delay for you.
So just, just one of the improvements that came along with the,
the length's unification.
We have the IPC 4761 via protection features.
Now, so when you create a VA, you can add like all the little other nifty things there.
To it, and that gets exported.
I think in ODBC and IPC 2581.
Not sure about Gerber because I don't know if we can define that in Gerber, but it's there.
Show selected copper area.
We can now like you can click on a piece of copper, like it's like it's own or an area on the board.
They'll tell you what the square.
They'll tell you the area and the size of that area.
So if you're wondering how much copper is on your board.
Sometimes that's a problem if you make big boards and you have a lot of copper.
You can get warping as the boards heated and cold because you have a big flat piece of copper.
You solder a bunch of pieces to it.
You used to be a big problem through hole.
It's less of a problem with surface mount.
So the custom rules we add bridge masks.
You can now define a custom rule based on if you have any special solder, you know bridge masking or your solder mask bridging requirements.
Some people do some people know, but it's there now.
So we've improved the point editor a lot.
So this allows you to move things around.
It's just a really improved to editing polygons.
So like your zones, you know, with the advanced snapping feature and the point editor feature changes.
Editing in the board editor is a lot more convenient.
So we now have removed my segment.
It's the back space key.
It's kind of like what we had in this schematic editor.
Just keep back space in it.
But you can now can remove a group of segments rather than just one.
So we have custom solder masks expansion, solder paste margin rules.
Here's just a quick view of what they look like.
We have, we have not support interlayer stuff on the footprints now.
In the past, it's only been top and bottom layers.
We just had the through holes and you could tell us what you could say all layers or no layers are top and bottom or whatever.
But now you can put custom stuff inside your foot and any layer on your footprint.
We actually have a one to one zoom and somebody's actually showing this with a ruler.
So if you say I want to see that what's this, what's this look like in real size.
We have true scale zoom scaling now.
We created a block, a file selection block indicator.
So you can say, hey, I'm just ignore the ignore the, ignore the, I'm sorry.
It warns you up on the status bar.
Hey, that's a lot.
And that's why it's blocking.
That's why I can't select it.
It's locked.
So rather than you having to go right click on it, is this locked or not.
So you get a little flashing indicator on the info bar when you try to move something or do something to something that's locked.
If you have net selection properties panel now, so you can change nets.
And any object.
Before that, you had to go into the.
The object itself has changed in that.
So we've cleaned up some of that stuff.
You can now scale a group of graphics.
If you have like a complex drawing, you can scale the whole thing up and down.
Instead of having to read draw it again or scale one piece at a time.
We have live angle preview when you're editing probably complex polygons.
You can see what the year angles are.
Here's the override lock.
You decide that you just, you know, don't care about your lock and you can just click this button and all the locks that you have on the border.
Effectively disabled.
Tandy when you're you got a board and you don't remember what you're locked and what you did lock.
We also added footprint point objects.
These are like anchors that are different from the default anchor for your footprint.
So you can add so any arbitrary anchor point like say you're trying to line something up to board edge and get it to.
You know how that goes sometimes you got to connect or you want to be at the right place of the board edge.
You could just create an anchor point now snap it to the board edge and that'll get it right where you want it.
Instead of using usually it's pad zero or pad one, the center of that pad does just typically the default anchor point.
Design blocks.
So we did schematic design blocks in nine.
We now have board design blocks which you can now match a design block schematic with a design block layout.
And then when you import those in your schematic and then you open your board it will have that block for each block that you have.
So you can now create libraries of reusable little bits and bobs that are related.
We added you can now the drill the drill the drill tab and the search panel so now you can search your drills if you want to just like any other searchable object.
We now have a real time barcode support you just create barcode is plopping in your board.
What as I was telling you in this schematic editor we also have line constraint pin and gate swap.
So if you swap pins you can swap the power pins you'll let you do that.
It's unconstrained and literally is unconstrained.
So be careful using this but if you know that I got an and gate and I just need to swap one and two you can do that right now.
But it will also let you swap one and five for one and so it's just our it's unconstrained.
There's a there we also have DRC fix action like in the schematic editor we had a DRC fix action you have the same thing for the DRC.
We you can now define a customer rule for for footprint so you we have a rule a new field call rule and you can you can you can add your customer rule that into only apply to that footprint.
And a couple of miscellaneous features that are improvements to the the propagation delay calculators strip lines.
For those of you are windows dark mode on windows is not the easiest thing in the world to support but we've done a pretty good job it's not perfect.
There's a few controls that slip through everyone so I don't aren't exactly right but for you dark mode lovers it's always worked on mac and Linux but.
We got it working on windows now too.
I'm space mouse if for those of you have the neat neat 3D space mouse.
We now have that for Linux the Linux driver for that was not.
Quite the same I think actually the folks it's the space mouse folks actually contributed the.
Mac OS and the windows support but we wanted to we need there's an open source driver for the space or the space mice if you have one it now works on Linux.
And for those of you do presentations and PDF we can export 3D PDFs now as far as I know this really only works in Adobe reader and maybe fox it.
And although it's a fox on Linux is I still have I have had limited success with fox on Linux but it might work on windows but yes you be 3D.
PDF export and there's new navigation wizard down on the bottom left so like you can change to all your orthogonal modes views without having to.
Click up on the top.
So that's about it for the list just a quick run down so between 9 and 10 it's almost 5400 commits and we're not done yet it's going to be more that's that works out the 14.7 commits per day so we're a bit we're active.
Symbol library they added 952 new symbols yeah it's 116 foot prints which now.
70% of those are script generated so they're very consistent we don't you know there's a few.
Strugglers that are hand ROM but most of them are now January of squips we have 306 306 new 3D models the median birds time for processing new MR for the library team went from 3 days to 18 hours.
The library team has really been on top of it they've done a great job.
Documentation this is this is a this is a little loud date but we've added a lot of documentation both 9 and as well as.
There's a few things in 10 that we're still working on but it should be all up to date by the time we release 10 the documentation we've got a really good job of keeping that up to date.
And since we are not we haven't as soon as RC one gets released we're in string freeze so the translations are a little behind so.
I'm not going to talk about 11 because I don't have time but if it's it's a homework assignment if it's something what you're interested in following it go to the web forum that link the first link there will take you to that web page.
We're pretty good about the things that real time as we push them into the into the repo and they're built we get a.
Usually there's a little description in either screenshot or quick video recording so you get an idea how it works.
So I just want to say thanks to everyone who contributes to key card I can't thank there there's everyone enough they're time and talent is invaluable and thank you for that.
Thanks to our platinum sponsors watch you next PCB key card services corporation a PCB way.
Thanks to all our sponsors everybody who sponsored key card from the every every donor everybody who's donated their time and talent I appreciate it.
Thank you for using key card.
Yes, thank you.
It's like that it's like that all the if a tree falls in the forest I did you know if if you write a great piece of cope and nobody uses it right so it's really cool it's really fun for me to see.
Everybody using key people using key cat and all the cool things they're using to do with it do it with you know so I hope we've done a great job of allowing you to meet your.
PCB design needs and electronic design needs and hopefully we can continue that going forward and hopefully I'll see you all of you at a key conference in 2026.
Thank you.
Thank you Wayne.
All right, we got a couple of minutes for questions here.
Are there any plans to add an ink.
Pete.
Yes, I answered this question probably about 10 times at the booth.
The answer is we want to.
The answer is the same as it was last year the impediment is the there's quite a few issues with.
The modeling libraries either they don't build on every platform.
Some of them are still using for trend we don't have our there's limited number of arm 64 for trend compilers.
Given the fact that so many platforms are armed now and we have a strict policy in the key cat project there's no second class citizens.
We actually have some demos of people doing you know EM simulation.
You know it's extracting the wire mesh and you can do it it's painful but it can be done.
But I think the free CAD guys now have an EM solver I have not played around with it.
You might want to give it a try I think it uses Elmer.
So you just extract your you just export your step file.
The full key CAD with all the traces and everything in it and then you can run but then you enter all your your simulation parameters in free CAD.
And then it's it's a it's a tool it's a workbench right yeah yeah there's a there's a so you can get that a try.
So you can be done it's not integrated into to key CAD directly but we still have some work to do.
You know we still have to get some the bits and pieces in play.
I have a question do you use any of this modern.
I call agents not yet no.
I'm you look like all things in the world I mean if if we've gotten some AI's submissions that you know we're not of great quality but we've had some that you know.
With some tweaking and work work around we can work with it I just you know like anything it's I'm sure it's it's a useful tool.
It just has to be the key CAD code base is really complex right so the AI tends to struggle with integrating.
If it's like something new I think it probably doesn't like I to be fair my experience and this isn't.
But like some of the things I've seen it do it it's just our code bases.
Pretty complicated and so trying to fix something.
That it doesn't understand the consequences of if it gets it wrong is problematic.
But yeah I don't I don't plan on doing anything with the AI as far as either either as code submissions or as.
You know automatically lay out your boards I mean I've been I've been following some of the stuff online I'm sure you have.
And then I haven't see I haven't been like blown away by anything I keep asking people like I always tell people look if you have some.
You have something that really looks like wow this is really doing a good job set please send me a link because I'm curious right I mean I've been I was an engineer I did design for 35 years right.
And some of the but I haven't seen anything yet.
If if something would get to what I we consider an acceptable standard.
Yeah I wouldn't I don't have a.
Yeah either way I just wanted to be good it's got to be good enough for me to go yeah what we can now that's something that's useful for keycat right now just haven't seen it.
It may exist I like I said I can't follow everything I that that space moon is moving so fast.
Yeah I I don't know.
Is is the AI well the API for the CLI landed version 10.
Can you say again will the API in the command line will that land in version 10.
Are you talking about the headless are you talking about the headless API now it's it's not going to be headless yet.
We have some work to do we have to tease out some of the UI stuff if we want to do like a headless API you're talking about the IPC API.
Yeah no that's not that's not probably going to happen although to be fair the command line tools in general are pretty thorough now we there's not much you can't generate.
The command line tools and clues you can run DRC and ERC you can do all kinds of stuff in the command line all the I think every output that we can generate you can generate with command line so.
That kind of is a headless option.
It's just that you can't like lay out a board.
But I don't know if you want to do that headless anyway because you wouldn't be able to see it until afterwards so.
What's that for Kai connect.
Well why wouldn't you push to a live running key kind instance.
Because we don't support multiple boards okay that's that's a feature that's a different you're the second person today to mention that I don't hear that too often but you're the second person today.
Are we done we're done okay so thank you rain.
And as usual if anybody wants to talk to me I'll be I'll be out hanging out now if you're leaving please leave through that door.