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 application is in a very usable state now – you can download and create libraries, draw schematics, route multilayer PCBs and export Gerber files. Unfortunately features like DRC, BOM export or buses are not implemented yet, they will be provided in a future release.

If you encounter bugs, we would be happy if you report them to our issue tracker. As it’s only a release candidate, there is some time to fix the most critical issues until the first stable release.

File Format Stability

Until now, we always communicated that the file format is not considered stable. Any change in the file format could break older projects, so generally it was not recommended to use LibrePCB productively.

With this first release candidate we consider the file format to be stable, so any future release should be able to open libraries and projects created with this release candidate. Only if there is an extremely critical issue with the file format we may still do a breaking change before publishing the stable 0.1.0 release – but that’s very unlikely :)

ATTENTION: The file format is only considered stable for official releases – any intermediate version (e.g. from nightly builds) may not be upgradeable in the next release! So if you already used our nightly builds (or other binaries built from the master branch), you have to switch to official releases now. Nightly builds must really not be used for productive work. See developers information and release workflow documentation for details.

Libraries

Our official and ready-to-use libraries can easily be installed with the library manager integrated in LibrePCB. But as these libraries currently only contain very few elements, we would be very happy to get pull requests at the corresponding repositories to add much more elements!

Download

The release candidate can be downloaded for all major operating systems at our new download page:

Many thanks to all the contributors and sponsors making this release possible! It was hard work of more than five years to bring out this first release. We would really appreciate if you supported the development either with contributions or donations (e.g. at Patreon). Every dollar helps to keep this huge project alive ;-)

And now: Happy testing! :-)