I have been continuously using KiCad since 2005 (I am a former colleague of JP Charras), and I am now focusing my research on increasing the sustainability of electronics, especially at the PCB level. In this context I am member of the DESIRE4EU research project (https://desire4eu-eic.eu) which has the aim to bring to industry new innovative low-impact substrates for PCB, compatible with current subtractive manufacturing technologies. With Arduino onboard, we are currently designing (on KiCad of course!) the next IoT Arduino board, through an eco-design approach.
Part of my work consists of exploring new PCB design rules that would significantly contribute to reduce the ecological footprint of PCBs (typically 5 to 25% of an assembled electronic board), at the manufacturing step and at end-of-life. I now think that CAD softwares could include sone kind of eco-design tool to help the designers in evaluating and reducing the ecological footprint of their design. The tool could be part of the KiCad toolbox, inside the PCB Calculator application. Among other things, it would probably rely on life cycle assessment macro-results (a small database), upstream produced by some LCA software. I cannot be a software contributor to KiCad, but if some developers show interest in this potential new tool, I could contribute to provide the inputs and the design of the tool. I suppose that this "eco-design rules" concept can seem rather vague for a lot of people, and I'd be delighted to develop our research results on copper circularity, and how we can rethink our way of laying out copper on the PCB layers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "KiCad Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/2d4cbc40-474c-4e5e-baf9-018e9f83d97an%40kicad.org.
