Some big news came through earlier this month from the CircuitMaker team: CircuitMaker, Altium’s free PCB design tool is officially out of beta with the release of v1.1 and is available for download. The new, fully-fledged version of CircuitMaker is integrated with Octopart and already contains over 223,000 parts (and growing) in its component library. If you’re already a CircuitMaker user, be sure to update your installation and check out the Tasks panel, Start page, project pages, and community metrics to see significant improvements.

Perhaps even more excitingly, the CircuitMaker community projects page has launched to the public, full of great ideas and community members building hardware projects.

The community project page is particularly valuable for the open hardware world. There are are hundreds of designs in there already - if you’re looking for Arduino shields, headphone amplifiers, or persistence of vision projects, they’ve got you covered. And if there’s something there you’re interested in building you can start from scratch or fork an existing design and get to work!