KiCon 2019: A Brief Trip Report

Editor’s note (September 2026): This is the trip report I wrote on 29 April 2019, the day we flew home from the very first KiCon in Chicago. It was originally published on my old Blogspot at bjoekeldude.blogspot.com and is republished here word for word, typos and all. The last paragraph turned out to be a promise: two years later we ran the first KiCon in Bochum, and since 2024 the city hosts KiCon Europe. The later chapters have their own write-ups: KiCon Europe 2024, KiCon Asia 2025 and KiCon Europe 2026: Trip Report without the Trip.

KiCad, spoken “Key-Cat”, is one of numerous Open-Source projects started by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). KiCad is widley used throughout industry and science to design printed circuit boards, PCBs. To be fair, KiCad is more than just a program. It’s a collection of a couple of different programs bundled together to a suite for electronic design automation. Started by JP Charras in 1992, 27 years later Chris Gammel, founder of Contextual Electronics and author of “The Amp Hour”-Podcast, launched the first public KiCad-only event at mHub in Chicago, IL.

Our Trip started on Sunday early morning at our office in Bochum, GER. Me and my coworker Marie started with an awesome train-ride with 300 km/h between Cologne and Frankfurt, catching our plane on time, non-stop to Chicago. After a flight of about 8.5 h, and taxiing for more than 45 min, we finally got to the CBP officer, that had us stuck for almost 2 h in at the immigration office for asking about 10 s of questions. What a bummer. Nevermind. Taking a Lyft to our AirBnB was quiet fast, even thou traffic was aweful.

All of Monday we spend on checking out Downtown Chicago, which we both had never been before. Clear blue skies and 22°C made it easy to enjoy ourselves at the lakeshore, having lunch at navy pier and wandering around on the magnificent mile and visiting John Hancock Center to enjoy a beautiful bird-view of “the Second City”. In the evening we attended the NERP - Meetup at Pumping Station One. WOW! That’s what I call a hacker-space. Over 1.200 m² of tools. Woodshop, Hot-Metal Shop with welding and plasma-cutting equipment, all of the electronics-tools, laser-cutters and engravers as well as 3D printers, sewing machines and a full-grown kitchen including a bar. If you ever come to Chi-Town, make sure to visit this place! It’s worth it. Thank Joe at this point for giving us the tour through the space.

Getting up early on Tuesday left plenty of time to get work done with an awesome view out of our appartments window. In the afternoon we went downtown again doing almost 30k steps, just like the day before. Visiting Millenium Park to have a look at the giant Jelly-Bean and enjoy the sundown from Hancock-Centers Skybar. Wonderful view and definitly worth having a Revolution-Brewery Beer up there.

Wednesday same procedure in the morning, getting up early to get work done and spending all afternoon downtown. Now to have a 40 min cruise on Lake Michigan. TBH, not the best investment after all, but whatever ;) Having lunch at Nutella-Cafe was worth it after all. Visiting Ballast-Point Brewery in the evening was okay, but not a recommendation after all. No Service at the table, long ques to get a beer made it kind of a hassle to enjoy the time there.

On Thursday, finally KiCon started for us. First in the moring, meeting with schne1der_, the aisler guys, Greg aka the Twitter-Guy, Taylor and Riyad to have breakfast and look at each others electronic projects. And YES, Gregs projects do look even better than his renderings on twitter. Right after breakfast -> sweatshop. We met with Chris at the venue to help him setting up all of the goodie-bags, sponsored by Digi-Key, OSH-Park, aisler, SnapEDA and Royal Circuits. After work Chris took us on a tour around mHub. What a crazy place to work. Just like PSone this place was equipped with everything that makes a nerds heart, like mine, beat faster. Whether you’d like to use a full-grown CNC-Milling machine or a reflow production-street, it’s there. This is where I got my first Take-Away from this KiCon. We need to have more places like this, where especially young people and young companies can engage with each other and learn how to manufacture real products. After a couple of hours well spent, we headed down to Ballast Point once more to celebrate a small pre-event and Hardware-Happy-Hour organized by Drew. Unfortunately for Chicago he is going to move to Berlin, Germany in a few weeks. Lucky Berlin I’d say. Lookin forward to be attending a 3H Berlin Meetup. Since it was Dountstag (from the German word Donnerstag for Thursday) we had a dozen of Dunkin Donuts at the bar, which we sold for a good advice on electronic designs here is Maries and My top five:

5 - Always check design-rules

This seems quiet obvious, but make sure, you always use built in tools to run design-rule checks. If you get messages. Take them seriously!

4 - Never ever route data-traces underneath a switching-PS

EMC is a bitch. Especially when you are running some sort of autoroute, make sure you keep data-traces clear from high frequent noises on your board.

3 - Manufacturers alter your data. All the time.

This is an advice from the aisler guys. With their profession in providing PCBs, they know what they are talking about. Even though you might send the exact same Gerber-Files to different manufacturers, you won’t get the exact same board back.

2 - Double-check your footprints - Top-View/Bottom-View

Since some chip-vendors don’t provide their footprints in open libraries (well Snap-EDA and Digi-Key try to achieve this) you every once in a while have to draw them yourself. Make sure you are reading the data-sheet correctly, especially whether you are using top or bottom-view footprints! Also please put your parts origin in the middle of symetrical parts and in the middle of pin 1 of asymetrical parts. This makes it way easier to extract pick-and-place data.

1 - Print out your circuitboard on paper

This is my personal top-advice. Even it looks so easy, I never ever did this before. Ask your distibutor for all an example of all of your parts, or 3D print them out and place them on a paper-printed PCB. Thus you can easily check all your footprints before shooting your Gerbers to your manufacturer!

Looking at all the awesome electronics people brought, we were all hungry for KiCon kick-off the morning after!

Friday morning started with breakfast-burritos at mHub. First in the morning I attended the KiCad-Beginners workshop, trying to learn, how I could improve my own KiCad-teaching-skills. I really had a great time with Shawn Hymel bilding a simple board and talking about how to teach electronics to beginners. Major take-aways out of this workshop: Bantamtools milling machines are a great tool for schools to provide their students with selfmade circuitboards. Those milling machines don’t really make sense for production-purposes or real product prototyps, but as a teaching-tool: AWESOME! Take-Away #2: When teaching KiCad, make sure you ran your tutorial with the exact version your students are running. KiCad is a living product, that changes and improves all the time. Make sure to always use the newest release.

Marie took her time to attend a couple of talks. She especially liked 2 of those. First of all: Dmitry Zhgent, CEO of CADLAB.io talking about their tool for visual version controll, based on git. Everyone that has ever worked with git and KiCad knows the issues of merge-confilicts. Dmitry and his team are doing their best to show how to improve solving merging-conflict with a visual representation. Try it!

Second best, maybe not as useful but visionary, was Kerry Scharfglass’ talk on alternative user-interfaces for EDA. He designed an additional keyboard-turning-know-system to improve his KiCad work on a surface studio. Even though, he wasn’t satisfied with the results, he showed how EDA may improve over the next years. Hindsight is 20/20.

After a couple of sandwiches, the afternoon-sessions started. Best talk of the afternoon was Craig Bishop, showing a brief history of autorouters. He explained when to use them, and when not. Knowing the pitfalls of autorouters after this, makes me think, that we can accelarate our designs with them, without screwing everything up. If it really works, well as Beyonce once sang “If you like it then you should have put a test on it”. So this will be my homework, to try using autorouters.

The evening we spend at PSone again, having a great afterparty. Thanks for your homebrew Mate Joe!

Saturday morning started and I have to admit, going to bed at 3.30 am and getting up early was a bad idea. Especially the last 3 games of beerpong were not a good idea after all, but my beerpong-buddy Kevin was even more a train-wreck that morning. Best talk of the morning was Barry Buelow, talking about his retirement hobby: his new Neoden Pick-and-Place machine. After all, it appears like a good idea to NOT do it yourself, but let experts do that for you when you want to have production-ready results. Looks like a fun passtime though.

After a really cool discussion at lunch with Mihir Shah of Royal Circuits, on how we can help manufactures providing us with the boards we need so badly, the talks on main-stage started again. 2 high-quality talks in a row. One about marketing your open-source products by Shawn Hymel (always awesome and worth it, listening to him) and one on how to use SPICE-simulations the right way in KiCad by Stephan Kulov. You should definitly have a look at them as soon as Carl Karsten loads them up to Chris’ channel.

After a coffee-break I spend all of the afternoon discussing marketing your products with Matt from Amazon Robotics. Thanks for this discussion and I am really looking forward to meeting you in a couple of days in Germany!

After this super-awesome event was closed by Chris Gammel, we all went to Jefferson Tap Bar, in order to celebrate this event properly with Mike from hackday.io. A great evening of discussions which ended with Jeff Carr and me sitting at a table with more than just a few beers in our heads, discussing the future of open-source tools to manufacture silicon. I am really looking forward to what Wayne Stambough and he will come up with in the next year. Shoutout to Cadence at this point: you should probably search the discussion with Jeff at some point in the close future. I have to say I like his ideas!

All of sunday we spend at PSone again, having great discussions with all of the people from the local hackerspaces in Chicago. It was really inspiring, to see the differences in hacker-space organisation between Germany and the US. Thank you all for participating. In the evening Carl gave me a brief intro into using Voctomix. Thanks for that, I appreciate it! After a, kind of genuine, German Street-Food experience at Dmon Bar with Döner and Currywurst, we spend the evening trying Andrews robots cocktails!

By the way, the reason we were at PSone once again was its 10 years anniversary. Unfortunately those guys are searching for a new location somewhat close by, since their current building will be sold in a few month :( too bad.

Now sitting at a local donut-place, waiting for our plane flying in and taking us back, we realize HOW intense this week was. We learned a lot and made a couple of cool people we only knew from the internet. All of them were as cool as we would have expected it. Thanks to everyone that made this event so great for us:

Thanks Riyad, Greg, Taylor, Matt, Alvaro (btw you should listen to his Podcast “Unnamed Reverse Engineering”), Wayne, Kevin, Weston, Joe, Stephan, Stefan, Felix, Patrick, Shawn, Jeff, George, Andrew, Carl and all of the others I forgot. It was a pleasure to meet you all. And of course: thank you Chris for organizing all of this.

It almost looks like we will be organizing some sort of event like this in Germany to spread the word in Europe. If you are interested, please let me know!

Best,

Marie & Stephan