Kicad 5.0 now available

[KingJL]

I had been putting of aggressive pursuit of a couple of projects until Kicad 5.0 had been finalized. There were enough architectural changes that I did not want to go through the process of re-engineering the projects to work with 5.0. I had been playing with the pre-release "nightlies". There are some interesting improvements and new features with the new Kicad... most importantly (to me) simulation capability and the ability to import Eagle projects.

http://kicad-pcb.org/blog/

[Qiaozhi]

I did spend some time using the pre-release 5.0 code, but there were so many problems that I reverted back to 4.0.2 on Linux. Even then, it's not the most intuitive of interfaces, so I also decided to wait until 5.0 was officially released.
At the moment I don't have the time to investigate this further, but will watch your progress with interest.

[KingJL]

The new simulation capabilities relies on ngspice-26 (which is included in the Kicad 5.0 installation). One of the issues with simulation with ngspice-26 was the laborious effort to translate pspice and there was no generic VDMOS model. On the https://forum.kicad.info/ forum, there are instructions on upgrading to ngspice-28 which allows for direct translation of pspice and the availability of a generic VDMOS model.