Through a chance piece of design, the leading power pack in terms of energy density is made by / branded on behalf of Haribo, a confectionary company:

https://www.ultralightnerd.com/index.php/2025/06/26/haribo-m...

What’s interesting is, like the other products, it was designed and marketed for one purpose but has become very popular for another. (Although in this case it could well just be a fashion, especially given how uniquely identifiable the product is.)

It doesn't fit into the list as a revolution (or even 'evolution') as it's just a high-density, compact and cheap battery [1] that turns out to be quite unsafe [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322135

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46071317

It's probably a reference to the Haribo power bank thing (which appears to be poorly made and dangerous).

I keep wanting to get into Kicad, and the learning curve did become easier in the last years. But what I _want_ is to get a usable board into my hands, not just create a beautiful layout file. Historically, my pain points were were footprints, parts sourcing and SMT soldering. From a hobbyist-with-limited-time perspective, EasyEDA and the integrated JLCPCB assembly flow solved all these problems good enough that the hurdle to figure out how to do it with KiCAD was always higher. The minute I find a similar level of convenience in KiCAD + plugins, I'll gladly ditch being tied to online.

Is it though? EasyEDA is more than sufficient for most uses that don’t require large amounts of layers or components. It’s easy to pickup by a novice, has basic ERC, well integrated into LCSC ecosystem.

It doesn’t have the versatility of KiCAD but is lighter and easier for light use or occasional design of moderate complexity.

I tried to start with KiCAD so many times and never could fully figure out how to do the basics of what I wanted to do. Mind you I was designing absolutely basic boards using capacitors, MOSFETs, resistors, some basic SMD sensors and ESP8266 modules. EasyEDA has a downloadable version that is significantly less clunky and the UI makes a lot of sense to an amateur. Plus of all the things I had tried it had me spend the least time finding footprints for components that were actually available and affordable. Nothing quite like picking out a capacitor just to find out that it costs $0.84/each while an equivalent but slightly different one would be $0.0037/each.

also, they were taking advantage of free sampling of JLCPCB in China. The main pcb is basically free

Add transport, tariffs and vat, and you could as well buy a cheap Android tablet from Walmart.

This looks like the perfect thing to replace my POS Jenn-Air oven's defective touchscreen control panel...