1.0.0-beta.14 Public Beta

Fourteenth public beta.

Importing boards and Gerber sets

• A board import now writes the stackup rows — the copper layers, in
  order, bound to their drawing layers. You must still enter the substrate numbers (thickness, er,
  loss tangent) - what you no longer do is hand-author eleven rows to reproduce what the importer already knew.
• The board thickness the file claims is carried onto the stackup and shown beside the live sum of
  your layer thicknesses, with a disagreement marked and neither number silently corrected.
• A drill file's plating is honoured, so a non-plated mounting hole is no longer extracted as a
  barrel shorting every layer it passes through.
• A parameter file beside the artwork is now read — the coordinate format the whole job was written
  with, and the tool listing's plating column. A declaration outranks an inference; where the file
  itself disagrees, the file wins and both values are printed. One parameter file per data kind is an
  ordinary folder shape now, not a contradiction that disables both.
• A board netlist beside the artwork is read as evidence, never as geometry. It settles which holes
  are vias and which are component pins — the old guess was systematically wrong on every through-hole
  pin — and puts net names back onto composited regions, the only route back to something compositing
  destroys for good. And an archive in a folder that yields no artwork is offered rather than ignored.

The Technology Stackup tab

• Conductivity has a preset list — five metals at 20 °C — beside a field that stays freely typeable.
• A plated via's wall thickness is explained and defaulted to the 25 µm every shipped technology
  uses, so an imported board no longer fails circuitRF's own validator on a field with a known answer.
• Via entries are listed as their own group instead of as a row inside the z order, where a via
  added before the conductors appeared above the top copper. Two entries sharing a name are reported,
  and Add now numbers them. A freshly imported six-layer stackup's sixteen "not entered yet" messages
  are one summary line that shrinks as you fill it in.

Workspace History

• The Restore Points and Versions panels are now one History panel — automatic restore points and
  the versions you kept on purpose in one filtered list, at Window ▸ Panels ▸ History and on the
  workspace toolbar.
• File ▸ Clone Workspace… copies a workspace onto your machine from an address, for when a shared
  library is handed out centrally rather than sitting on a share. circuitRF asks for no sign-in and
  stores none — it uses whatever your machine's git is already set up with, and an address it cannot
  supply credentials for stops and says what was wanted rather than hanging.
• File ▸ Pull Changes now shows what came down: versions on the other copy and not on yours are
  listed at the top of the History panel, dimmed and counted, and your files change only if you pick one.
• A workspace archive now has option to include its history — one checkbox on the archive dialog, off by
  default, which gives the recipient every version and restore point. First the dialog says how much
  larger the archive gets and names the files in the history that are no longer in the workspace:
  a project archived for one customer can carry another customer's deleted artwork, with nothing in
  the visible file tree showing it.
• Settings ▸ Revision Control is now on every machine. Without a usable Git it is greyed out with
  one line saying no history is being kept anywhere and why, rather than absent — and the Git row stays
  live, because installing git and pressing Detect is the remedy.

Command Line Improvements

• circuitrf render <path> -o out.{svg,pdf,png} turns a schematic, symbol, layout or data display
  into a picture from a script, a CI job or an assistant. Every pixel comes from the code that draws
  each frame in the application, so it is the picture the window would have shown. One command over
  every kind — a cell folder takes --view, a workspace takes --cell, and a document belonging to no
  workspace renders on the fallback palette exactly as the layout editor does.
• --fit (the default), --window or --center/--span frame the view; a window of a different aspect
  is letterboxed, never cropped. On a layout every coordinate carries a unit and a bare number is
  refused — 500 could be DBU, µm or mm, and all three draw a plausible picture of the wrong thing.
• --detail full draws exactly what is stored, --detail screen uses the level-of-detail a canvas
  does — on a real board, 6.2 MB in 0.36 s against 23.5 MB in 1.44 s. --layers and --hide-layers
  narrow what is drawn.
• circuitrf explain answers the three questions you need first — --cells, --layers with
  per-layer shape counts so you do not ask for an empty one, and --extents, the box a fit frames on.

Netlists, analyses and results

• A netlist line the reader does not understand is now refused. An unknown type= is refused
  listing the legal ones, an unknown key is named with the legal keys for its analysis, and every
  missing required key is reported at once. Such a line used to be accepted, and the document then
  simulated something else.
• Unit= on a sparam directive now applies to start, stop and step, as it already did inside a
  parametric sweep. A 0.5–6 GHz sweep had been running at 0.5–6 Hz and returning a flat S11 that
  looked entirely reasonable.
• An inline unit works in a netlist assignment, as it always did in a schematic: VDS = 48 V.
• Boolean parameters read the same way everywhere. BiasTee=true, =1 and =Yes used to produce
  a Tuner with no bias tee at all.
• An instance line binding the wrong number of nets is refused before the run, naming the count. A
  short line used to skip expansion in silence and build a wired-wrong circuit that ran to completion.
• Every result cube says what its numbers are in, with "unknown" a legitimate answer for your own
  measure expression. One result had carried the same efficiency twice — a cube in percent and a scalar
  as a fraction — with nothing saying which was which.
• A two-port with a 12 Ω second port is written and read back as one: the per-port references
  travel with the file and nothing is renormalized. sparam -o honours the extension you gave it,
  and a name asking for a format it cannot write is a refusal listing the ones it can.
• explain --analysis no longer calls a chain runnable when it names a tuner the design does not
  have, and says which reference failed.

For AI assistants - MCP Improvements

• render is available to an assistant, and the result carries the rendered file itself rather than
  a path many clients cannot open.
• The component catalogue says how many nets a line binds, not how many pins the symbol draws. A
  client that wrote a one-net Tuner line from the old description got a bench whose bias tee delivered
  nothing, with every diagnostic clean, and wrote the part up as defective.
• Reference pages for analysis directives, data displays and technologies, generated from the
  readers that enforce them. And a result can be narrowed instead of returned whole — --at,
  --range, --interp, --result summary; one question about one frequency of a 551-point two-port
  run used to cost 173 kB.

Misc

• The layout Property Inspector follows the display unit. Switching µm to mil with a shape selected
  left every row showing the old unit's numbers — and committing the untouched field you could see
  would have re-read 254 µm as 254 mil.
• Arming Pin, Term or GND from the schematic toolbar now clears the selection. With a resistor
  selected, R rotated the resistor and Delete deleted it.
• Removing a cell no longer offers to save it on the way out, which would have written the file back
  and un-removed half the cell. A torn-off panel no longer outlives its window — its buttons still
  worked. Library Palette order: Vdc now sits after VProbe, and Bead and SRLC trade places.