The £0 Hardware Stack That Gets You to Production
By the CADPreview Team · Series: KiCad is Enough
"Free doesn't mean amateur. It means the cost went somewhere other than the licence fee."
Fit for purpose engineering isn't just about picking the right tool. It's about understanding how the tools connect, and making sure nothing in the chain is there because nobody thought to question it.
Let me be direct about what this article is and isn't.
It isn't a list of free tools you can download. It's a description of a coherent, production-capable hardware workflow where the software licence cost is zero. Every tool here is something I've used, or seen used, on hardware that went to manufacturing.
Free and production-ready are not in tension. The barrier to taking this stack seriously is mostly psychological, left over from a decade ago when "open source EDA" genuinely meant rough edges and inconsistent outputs. The stack below produces outputs that are indistinguishable, to your manufacturer, to your CM, to anyone reviewing a Gerber, from outputs produced by tools costing thousands of pounds per seat per year.
The Stack
1. KiCad — Schematic Capture and PCB Layout
If you've read the earlier pieces in this series, you know the position. No point rehashing it here.
What's worth adding in the context of a full toolchain: KiCad's file formats are text-based. Schematics, layouts, and project files are all human-readable, diffable, and version control-friendly in a way that Altium's binary formats are not. That's what makes the rest of this stack possible.
Cost: Free. Open source.
2. Git and GitHub — Version Control and the Collaboration Backbone
Most hardware teams don't use version control, or they use it badly, with filenames like board_v3_FINAL_use_this_one.kicad_pcb.
Git gives you a complete, recoverable history of every change, the ability to work in parallel without overwriting each other's work, and a single source of truth. Because KiCad files are text-based, Git diffs are meaningful. You can see that a resistor value changed, that a footprint moved, that a net was renamed. You can trace exactly when a decision was made, and why.
GitHub is where this lives in the cloud. It's also what connects the rest of the stack.
The next article goes deep on the Git workflow for hardware. If you've never used it before, it's less complicated than it sounds.
Cost: Free for public repos and for private repos up to a point that covers most small teams.
3. KiBot — Automated Fabrication Outputs
This is the one most engineers haven't heard of, and the one that makes the biggest practical difference.
KiBot reads your KiCad project and generates fabrication outputs automatically: Gerbers, drill files, pick-and-place, BOM exports, assembly drawings, PDF schematics. You configure it once with a YAML file that lives in your repository. After that, every push to GitHub regenerates your complete fab package from scratch.
One of the most common ways hardware projects go wrong at handoff is a mismatch between the current design file and the fabrication outputs someone generated three weeks ago on a machine with different settings. KiBot removes that class of error. The outputs are always generated from the committed source.
Combine it with GitHub Actions, also free, and you have a CI pipeline that runs DRC, generates your full fab package, and attaches it as a release artifact every time you tag a revision. Your CM gets a download link. They get the correct files. Every time.
Worth noting: KiCad 10.0 introduced native output job files — a built-in alternative configured directly in the KiCad UI, saved to your repository as a .kicad_jobset file, and runnable from the CLI. It covers the basics and removes the external dependency. For CI pipelines and the full range of output formats — assembly drawings, accurate BOM exports, DRC reports — KiBot remains the more capable option. But if you're starting out and want something simpler before adding tooling, the native jobs are a reasonable first step.
Cost: Free. Open source.
4. Simulation — ngspice and LTspice
KiCad ships with ngspice integration built in. You can annotate your schematic with SPICE models and run transient, AC, and DC operating point simulations without leaving the tool.
For the kind of simulation most hardware engineers actually run, checking a filter response, verifying a power stage, sanity-checking a biasing network, it's enough. If your needs go beyond that, LTspice is free, has an enormous community model library, and integrates cleanly with KiCad workflows through netlist export.
Cost: Free.
5. FreeCAD — Mechanical Integration
KiCad exports STEP, which handles most MCAD integration needs. If you need actual mechanical design work, FreeCAD is the open-source answer. The KiCad StepUp plugin creates a live, bidirectional link between the PCB layout and the FreeCAD model, so dimensional changes propagate without manual re-export.
FreeCAD is not SolidWorks. For serious mechanical engineering, that gap is real. For an electronics team that needs a mechanical workflow without a licence cost, it's a legitimate answer.
Cost: Free. Open source.
6. CADPreview — Design Visibility for the Whole Team
KiCad is a desktop application. Everyone not running it is outside the loop. Your firmware engineer who needs to check a pinout, your supply chain person reconciling the BOM, your CTO who wants to know where the project is at.
CADPreview connects directly to your KiCad project on GitHub and streams the design files, schematics, PCB layout, and BOM, directly to a browser. No storage on our end, no KiCad licence required on the viewer's side, no exports to remember. Create a Project Link and share it. Anyone with that link sees the current state of the design.
Cost: Free tier available. Pro tier for private repositories.
How It Flows Together
- Design in KiCad. Schematic capture, layout, DRC.
- Commit and push to GitHub. Every meaningful checkpoint gets a commit.
- KiBot runs on push. GitHub Actions triggers KiBot, which generates the full fab package and attaches it to the repository as a release artifact.
- CADPreview reflects the current design. Connect your GitHub repo once. After that, anyone with a link sees the live schematic and layout with no action required from the engineering team.
- Tag a release, hand off to your CM. Current files. Every time.
There is no step in this chain where you are relying on someone remembering to export something, or on a file in someone's Downloads folder being the right version.
What This Stack Doesn't Give You
Consistent with the approach in this series, worth being explicit.
It doesn't give you constraint-driven high-speed design. If you're routing DDR5 or PCIe Gen 4, you already know you need more than this stack provides.
It doesn't give you centralised library governance out of the box. A shared library in Git with a defined approval process covers a lot of ground, but you're building and maintaining that process yourself.
For the majority of hardware teams, those gaps aren't disqualifying. They're worth knowing, not worth worrying about.
The Honest Summary
The £0 hardware stack is: KiCad for design, Git and GitHub for version control, KiBot for automated fab outputs, ngspice or LTspice for simulation, FreeCAD when you need mechanical work, and CADPreview for team visibility. All of it connects. All of it is free or nearly so.
The cost didn't disappear. It moved. It moved into the time you spend setting things up correctly, the discipline of writing good commit messages, the care you put into verifying footprints against datasheets. Those costs were always there, even when you were paying for Altium. Now you're just being honest about them.
What's Next
The next piece closes the series argument: if KiCad is the right default, when is it genuinely not? We lay out the specific conditions under which Altium's cost is justified — constraint-managed high-speed design, library governance at scale, ECAD/MCAD co-design, and compliance requirements — and the conditions where you are paying for capability your team will never use.
CADPreview is a web-based viewer for KiCad projects hosted on GitHub, built for teams who want design visibility without the overhead. Connect your GitHub repo once, share a link, and your whole team sees the current design, schematics, PCB, BOM, in a browser, without installing anything.