Blog
Practical writing on KiCad, hardware tooling, and PCB collaboration — from engineers who've been there.
KiCad is Enough
4 articlesI ditched Altium. Here's What Happened.
Why one engineer switched from Altium to KiCad, what the transition actually cost, and what the experience revealed about how most hardware teams choose their tools.
2026-02-18
KiCad Myth-Busting: What It Can't Do vs. What People Think It Can't Do
Separating five-year-old reputation from current reality: what KiCad genuinely cannot do, and what it can do that people still assume it can't.
2026-02-22
The £0 Hardware Stack That Gets You to Production
A coherent, production-capable hardware workflow from schematic capture to manufacturer handoff, built entirely from free and open-source tools.
2026-02-26
When Should You Actually Pay for Altium?
The specific conditions under which Altium's cost is genuinely justified, and the ones where you are paying for capability your team will never use.
2026-03-01
The Hardware Budget
3 articlesYour Hardware Team's Tool Choice Is a Business Decision. Is Anyone Treating It Like One?
Why the decision to pay for premium EDA tooling is a business question that engineers are not positioned to answer alone, and what the right questions look like.
2026-03-05
What Is Altium 365, and Why Does Your Team Want It?
A plain-language explanation of what Altium 365 is, what it costs, and how to decide whether your team actually needs it.
2026-03-09
3 Things a CEO Should Ask Their Hardware Team About Tooling
Three questions that let a CEO evaluate hardware tooling spend without needing to understand the tools, and what each answer reveals.
2026-03-13
Hardware Visibility
4 articlesYour Schematic PDF Is Version-Untracked. Your Firmware Pays the Price.
How the habit of exporting schematic PDFs creates a version-tracking gap that firmware engineers discover at the worst possible moment.
2026-03-17
Your BOM Is a Living Document. Are You Treating It Like One?
Why the BOM should be a live view of the schematic rather than an exported document that begins diverging from the source the moment it is generated.
2026-03-21
What CADPreview Actually Shows You (Without Opening KiCad)
A plain-language tour of what CADPreview renders, how it connects to your repository, and which members of your team benefit most from each feature.
2026-03-25
Design Freeze Shouldn't Mean Communication Freeze
Why design freeze marks the point where revision history matters most, and how to make it accessible to everyone on the team who needs to act on it.
2026-03-29
Git for Hardware Engineers
5 articlesGit Was Built for Code. Hardware Engineers Use It Anyway. Here's Why.
Why Git, despite not being designed for hardware, remains the best version control option for teams working in KiCad, and what it cannot do that discipline must cover.
2026-04-02
Your First Hardware Repo in 10 Minutes
A step-by-step guide to getting a KiCad project onto GitHub using GitHub Desktop, with no command line and no prior Git experience required.
2026-04-06
What Does a "Commit" Mean When You Change a Resistor Value?
How to decide when to commit, what to include, and what to write, and why commit messages are communication across time rather than version control hygiene.
2026-04-10
Branching Strategies for PCB Design — Do They Even Make Sense?
How Git branching maps onto the realities of hardware revision management, where the software model breaks down, and why hardware branches don't die after merge.
2026-04-13
How CADPreview Turns Your Git History Into Something Your Whole Team Can Read
How the Git discipline described in this series becomes a navigation layer the whole team can use, without cloning a repository or opening KiCad.
2026-04-17