LibrePCB 2.1.1 Released
Today we released LibrePCB 2.1.1, which includes some improvements related to FreeRouting compatibility and keyboard shortcuts on macOS, and also various small bugfixes. Check out the changelog below.
LibrePCB Blog
Blog posts of LibrePCB, an Open Source EDA software
Latest posts
LibrePCB 2.1.0 Released
Today we released LibrePCB 2.1.0, bringing cross-probing, UI themes, 3D shading, a new project library manager, automatic library updates, and many more improvements! Check out the highlights and the full changelog below.
LibrePCB 2.0.1 Released
Today we released LibrePCB 2.0.1, which brings a few small improvements (e.g. better HiDPI screen support) and various bugfixes. See the full changelog below.
LibrePCB 2.0.0 Released
I am very proud to announce the release of LibrePCB 2.0.0 today, after 10 months of hard work! The implementation of a completely new UI with modern technologies marks the beginning of a new era in the history of LibrePCB. But there are also many other improvements and new features, check out the details below.
LibrePCB 2.0.0 RC1 Released
I’m very excited to announce that LibrePCB 2.0 is feature-complete and that a first release candidate is available for download!
LibrePCB Talk at FOSDEM 2026
I’m happy to announce that we will have a talk to present LibrePCB 2.0 at the next FOSDEM in Brussels! As the LibrePCB 2.0 release will be ready soon, it will be the main topic of my presentation. But I’ll also give a short update about the project itself (e.g. funding) and some insights into the development. And as usual, we will have a few minutes for a Q&A session.
Preview of LibrePCB 2.0's Next-Gen UI
I’ve made a lot of progress with the completely new user interface for LibrePCB 2.0 and am very excited to share some insights how it will look, and how it makes LibrePCB better in many ways. The Original Problem First, let’s quickly look back how everything began. Since the early days of LibrePCB around 2013, we are using Qt as the UI toolkit and the concept was to implement every editor as a…
Building Income Through LibrePCB: A Personal Story
The past 3 years were very exciting for me and the LibrePCB project, completely different to the previous 10 years of the project’s existence. With this blog post I’d like to give you some insights about my 'new' everyday life.
Library Updates Q1 2025
In the past few months our libraries got some nice contributions and also I created more than 70 important library elements and 285 3D models by myself to provide you more ready-to-use components and devices: screw terminals, push buttons, mounting holes and more!
LibrePCB 1.3.0 Released
Today we released LibrePCB 1.3.0 with an interactive HTML BOM export, several bugfixes and more! See the full changelog below. Highlights Note that this is mainly a bugfix release and most features currently in development will land in the LibrePCB 2.0 release which still takes some time. Nevertheless there are some noteworthy changes in this release. Interactive HTML BOM (#1485) Printing out the…
LibrePCB 1.2.0 Released
I’m happy to announce that LibrePCB 1.2.0 has been released today! Beside various general improvements and bugfixes, it contains a lot of new powerful features to increase productivity. See the highlights & full changelog below. Highlights KiCad Library Import (#1468) It’s not a secret that KiCad is the most popular EDA tool in the open-hardware community, and therefore many LibrePCB users worked…
NGI0 Grant for LibrePCB 2.0
Today I am very proud to announce that the LibrePCB project receives support from the NGI0 Commons Fund to develop LibrePCB 2.0. This allows us to implement a lot of exciting features and improvements, see details below. About the NGI0 Commons Fund NGI0 Commons is a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, and additional…
Open Letter to the European Commission
The Next Generation Internet (NGI) funding through the NLnet Foundation had a substantial impact on the development of LibrePCB 1.x. Without this grant, LibrePCB would not be where it is today — and many other free software projects too. However, it seems the European Commission plans to stop this funding in 2025, which would be very bad news for the whole free and open-source ecosystem. With this…
Partnership With NextPCB
Today I’m happy to announce our new manufacturing partnership with NextPCB, a large PCB manufacturer from China! About NextPCB NextPCB provides PCB manufacturing and assembly services with a lot of capabilities (e.g. materials, colors, surface finish, panelization, …) for a competitive price. See details at their capabilities sheet. In addition, they provide a free Design For Manufacturing (DFM)…
LibrePCB 1.1.0 Released
I’m happy to announce LibrePCB 1.1.0 which was released today! Once again there are some exciting new features, check out the details below. Highlights Live Parts Information (#1313) 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…
LibrePCB Talk at FOSDEM 2024
I’m happy to announce that once again there will be a LibrePCB talk at the next FOSDEM, which takes place in February 2024! After the Open Hardware devroom did not exist at the last FOSDEM in 2023, luckily this devroom will be back at FOSDEM 2024 where I’ll give a status update about the LibrePCB project. So if you’re curious about the progress of LibrePCB (also behind the scenes), feel free to…
LibrePCB 1.0.0 Released
After a few weeks of testing the RC1 and bugfixing, finally the stable release of LibrePCB 1.0 is finished and available for download! Check out the awesome new features and the migration notes below. For the reasoning behind bumping the version number to 1.0, check out the blog post LibrePCB 1.0 Roadmap. Highlights Advanced PCB Features One of the goals of this release was to get rid of several…
LibrePCB 1.0.0 RC1 Released
I’m very excited to announce that LibrePCB 1.0 is feature-complete and that a first release candidate is available for download! About This Release Candidate LibrePCB 1.0 contains a huge amount of changes compared to the previous release. Even though we give our best to keep the quality high and do lots of testing, such large changes always come with the risk of bugs. Thus, we first provide a…
LibrePCB 1.0 Roadmap
As mentioned in the previous blog post, I’ll give you a short update about the status of the upcoming release which is currently in development. Time for 1.0! The original plan was that the next release after LibrePCB 0.1.7 will have the version number 0.2. But thanks to the NGI0 grant I’m now able to spend much more time for LibrePCB, allowing to include more features in the next release than…
LibrePCB Receives NGI0 Grant
I am very happy to announce that the LibrePCB project receives support from the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme. This helps us to ensure the development of important features planned for the upcoming releases. Especially the next major release will extend LibrePCB with many new capabilities.…
LibrePCB 0.1.7 Released
Finally it’s time again to announce a new release – LibrePCB 0.1.7 brings several new features and a lot of usability improvements! This might be the last release of the 0.1.x series as LibrePCB 0.2.x development is ongoing as well. But, never say never ;-) Note for macOS users: Our official binaries do not run on macOS 10 anymore. You need macOS 11 Big Sur or later (or compile…
Partnership With PCBWay
We are happy to announce a new partnership with PCBWay, a large and popular PCB manufacturer from China! About PCBWay As a PCB designer you might already know PCBWay since it’s a very popular PCB manufacturer – for both, hobbyists and professionals. They offer a lot of capabilities (e.g. materials, colors, surface finish, panelization, assembly, …) for a competitive price. For…
LibrePCB Talk at FOSDEM 2022
After the introduction to LibrePCB talk at FOSDEM 18 and the status update talk at FOSDEM 20, I’m happy to give one more update about the current project status at FOSDEM 22! The status update talk will take place on Saturday, February 5, at 12:00 CET. Due to obvious reasons, it’s an online event this year. After the talk we will have some time for a live Q&A session. The details,…
LibrePCB 0.1.6 Released
After a whole year of development, we are very happy to finally announce LibrePCB 0.1.6, which contains a lot of useful improvements! Highlights LibrePCB Fab (#927) One major goal of the LibrePCB project is to make creating PCBs easier and faster by removing unnecessary complexity of the PCB design workflow. However, orderding PCBs with Gerber/Excellon files is still a hurdle, especially for users…
LibrePCB 0.1.5 Released
We are happy to announce LibrePCB 0.1.5 with several long awaited new features in the library-, schematic- and board editors! Highlights Copy&Paste in Schematic- and Board Editors Finally the clipboard functionality cut, copy and paste are available in the schematic- and board editors (#724, #754)! Just use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+X to cut, Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste schematic- or…
LibrePCB 0.1.4 Released
This minor release is one more important step to make LibrePCB more powerful and to improve usability of the user interface. Highlights Usability Improvements The user interface got many usability improvements to make creating libraries and projects more efficient. For example the schematic- and board editors now allow searching for symbols resp. devices (#671): Furthermore, all input fields for…
LibrePCB Talk at FOSDEM 2020
It’s two years ago since I gave the introduction to LibrePCB talk at FOSDEM 18. This was a milestone in the history of LibrePCB since it was the first time LibrePCB was actively presented to a large audience. Since that talk, there was a huge progress regarding LibrePCB. Therefore I decided to submit a status update talk at FOSDEM 2020. The talk takes place on Saturday, February 1, 10:55 in…
LibrePCB 0.1.3 Released
This release adds a lot of (long-awaited) new features and important bugfixes to LibrePCB. Highlights Design Rule Check for Boards (#581) Finally the board editor got a design rule check! It checks a PCB for common mistakes like missing connections, too small clearances (or shorts), or too thin copper elements. A new dock widget shows the reported messages and clicking on a message displays the…
LibrePCB 0.1.2 Released
This is mainly a bugfix release which fixes some usability, compatibility and functional issues of the 0.1.1 release. Highlights Support latest build environments The dependencies quazip, googletest, optional and type_safe were updated (#476) and some deprecation warnings were fixed (#478). Now LibrePCB also compiles with GCC 9.x and Qt 5.13 without any warnings. Since we migrated from Travis-CI…
LibrePCB 0.1.1 Released
There was a lot of progress the last months, and now it’s time to provide a new release containing all the improvements. In this release, especially the library editor was heavily improved to make it more powerful and easier to use. See the highlights and the detailed changelog below. Thanks a lot to all contributors and sponsors for pushing LibrePCB one step further! Highlights Design Rule…
Merchandise Products Available
You like LibrePCB and need some new clothes or a coffee mug? Then you might be interested in the merchandise shop which got online today! The Initial Idea Actually I just wanted to order some LibrePCB T-shirts for myself and thus was looking for a shop which allows to print custom designs on T-shirts. Then I found spreadshop which even allows to create whole shops with custom designs, so other…
AISLER Supports LibrePCB Projects
We are very happy to announce that AISLER now supports LibrePCB projects, so you can upload and review LibrePCB projects directly on their website and order PCBs and stencils just with a few clicks! :-) Why AISLER? AISLER, based in Netherlands, is a smart prototyping service for electronics. They provide PCBs, stencils and parts for electronic projects for an affordable price, and everything is…
LibrePCB 0.1.0 Released
The stable release 0.1.0 is out! Since the release candidate 0.1.0 RC2 three weeks ago, no critical bugs were reported, so we decided to finally publish the stable release 0.1.0. The changelog compared to 0.1.0 RC2 is very short: Changelog Library Editor: Fix saving of library URL Fix saving of component property “schematic-only” File Format Stability As this is an official stable…
LibrePCB 0.1.0 RC2 Released
After two weeks of testing, we have a new release candidate ready with some bugfixes and usability improvements: Changelog Control Panel: Hide non-existent recent and favorite projects Hide debug tools in workspace settings dialog Library Manager: Don’t show 100% progress while extracting ZIP Library Editor: Fix saving of component symbol position/rotation (#356) Schematic Editor: Fix…
LibrePCB 0.1.0 RC1 Released
Great news: Our first official release candidate is out! :-) If you didn’t try LibrePCB already, now is the time to start using (or at least testing) LibrePCB for your next projects – we would love to get your feedback! Project Status Please keep in mind that this is our very first release candidate, so you may encounter one or another bug or missing feature. Nevertheless, we think the…
Status Update 2018-09-15
The last blog post is already a few months ago, and many things happened in the meantime. Thus I would like to inform you about the current status of the project, what happened in past and what the next tasks are. New Logo Our logo was originally downloaded from a free icon portal. Although it was legal (thanks to its permissive license), it’s not a good idea to use a free icon as a logo.
LibrePCB Meets FontoBene
Finally! LibrePCB has a fully functional stroke font which can be used on PCBs. So now you can place designators or other text items on silkscreen (or other layers) which of course are then exported into the generated Gerber files. The new font file format FontoBene was developed especially for LibrePCB. Why a stroke font instead of OTF/TTF? It may sound strange to implement a primitive stroke…
LibrePCB Talk at FOSDEM 2018
The Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a great event for developers and users interested in free software. It is hosted at the ULB Solbosch Campus in Brussels, Belgium. This year it takes place on February 3 / 4. There are many different tracks available, but for us the most interesting one is the CAD and Open Hardware devroom. It contains talks about PCB…
LibrePCB Has Switched to S-Expressions
One major goal of LibrePCB is to use human readable files to represent libraries, projects and so on. This is important to let the user understand what the EDA tool actually does when modifying a schematic or board. In addition, a good file format is essential for version control systems to keep track of changes in libraries and projects. But LibrePCB doesn’t just want to have some human…
LibrePCB Has a Blog! :-)
Here it is: The long awaited blog of LibrePCB! It’s still very basic, but this will be improved some time ;) From now on, we will use this blog to provide various information, e.g. announcements of upcoming events, release notes, development progress or technical explanations. If you have any input regarding this blog or our website in general, please open an issue on the GitHub repository.