KiCon Europe 2024: Bochum Goes International

September 20, 2024 KiCad conference Bochum hardware open-source KiCon Open-Skunkforce

KiCon Europe 2024 took place on September 19–20 in the Rotunde Bochum, organised by Open Skunkforce e.V. together with the KiCad project. Around 150 people came — designers, engineers, developers, hobbyists — from across Europe and beyond. It was the largest KiCon we had run in Bochum.

From KiCon Germany to KiCon Europe

The conference didn’t appear out of nowhere. In 2020, I organised the first KiCon Germany — a small, informal gathering of KiCad users in Bochum. We ran it four more times, each edition a little bigger, a little more polished. In 2024 we made the leap to a proper European edition: new venue, full two-day programme, workshops, international speakers.

Pre-conference social the evening before — group dinner at a traditional Bochum pub

The evening before the conference started with a social dinner. These informal evenings before the programme begins are often where the most useful conversations happen — and this one was no exception.

The Venue Setup

The Rotunde is a converted industrial building in Bochum-Langendreer. Great atmosphere, brick walls, good acoustics. Getting it ready was a different story.

The Rotunde the evening before doors open — standing tables set up, venue empty

The setup was a production in itself. Everything that could go wrong did, at least once. Tabea Bökelmann (@tabeatheunicorn) held most of it together — without her, the logistics would have collapsed on day one.

Wayne, Seth, and What That Meant

For both days, Wayne Stambaugh and Seth Hilbrand — the two people most responsible for where KiCad is today — were present in Bochum. It was the first time either of them had come here.

I had met Wayne once before, at the original KiCon 2019 in Chicago, which was organised by Chris Gammel of Contextual Electronics. That was a much smaller event, but it planted the idea that a regular European equivalent was worth building. Five years later, here we were.

Highlights from the Programme

Lukas Hartmann — How KiCad Enables the Open Hardware Future

Lukas Hartmann builds open hardware laptops — the MNT Reform and Pocket Reform are entirely open-source, down to the schematics and PCB files. His talk showed how KiCad is not just a design tool but the foundation that makes open hardware reproducible and auditable by anyone. The “CPU Modules” slide alone — showing actual PCBs of compute modules he designed — made the point better than any abstract argument could.

Lukas Hartmann presenting on open hardware CPU modules at KiCon Europe 2024

Odin Holmes — Edgy

Odin Holmes presented Edgy — a framework for source-controlled, modular PCB reference designs. The core idea: treat PCB subsystems like software libraries, version them properly, compose them. For anyone who has copy-pasted the same power section into the fifth board in a row, the talk hit.

Odin Holmes on stage at KiCon Europe 2024 — Edgy talk

cpresser — Become a KiCad Librarian

One of the workshops that generated the most discussion was cpresser’s session on becoming a KiCad librarian — how the official symbol and footprint libraries are maintained, what the contribution process looks like, and what it actually takes to get a part merged. Practical, hands-on, and overdue: a lot of people use the libraries without knowing how they work or how to improve them.

The Programme in Full

All talks are recorded and available in the KiCon Europe 2024 playlist on YouTube. A few other sessions worth watching:

How to build awesome KiCad plugins — Joel Schulz-Andres
Managing PCB Assembly Variants with KiVar — Mark Hämmerling
CE For makers — Leveraging KiCad — Clemens Mayer
Speed up your Hand Assembly with the Pixel Pump — Thea (workshop)
Clearance and creepage for safety — Fabien Corona
The KiCon Electronic Badge — Michael MSvB

What Struck Me

The breadth of the crowd was the thing I hadn’t fully anticipated. Hobbyists who build one board a year sat next to engineers running production lines. People came from well outside Germany — some from places where there’s no local KiCad community at all. The programme reflected that: there was something for someone picking up KiCad for the first time and something for people filing bug reports against the routing engine.

The KiCad project itself is in a strong place. Having Wayne and Seth in the room for two days, available for questions and conversations in the hallway, made that concrete in a way that watching release videos doesn’t.

Open Skunkforce e.V.

KiCon is one of several conferences Open Skunkforce e.V. runs out of Bochum. The others:

emBO++ — embedded C++ conference, running since 2016
OpenTapeout — open-source chip design, first edition 2021
Practical Datascience Conference (PDSC) — applied data science for practitioners

The thread connecting all of them is the same: bring people who are actually building things into the same room, keep it affordable, and let the programme be driven by what the community finds worth talking about.