Show HN: KiCad in the Browser

(demo.pcbjam.com)

27 points | by ViktorEE 2 hours ago

5 comments

  • varun_ch 11 minutes ago
    This is really cool. I think a lot of people will initially dismiss your demo as ‘slop’ unless the landing page drops some of the Claude-isms (text and design) because it’s clear this is a project with passion in it, but the demo page and landing page both look like something Claude might’ve made with a single prompt.
    • ViktorEE 7 minutes ago
      You're wrong! It was two prompts! Jokes aside, you're right. I wanted to have something up quickly. Before the real launch ( and not just this demo ) I'll write one by hand, I'm against AI written copy / blogposts, just could not find the headspace to focus.

      Again, thanks for the feedback, I'll take it!

  • ViktorEE 44 minutes ago
    To open a demo board click "Open" in the Projects/Demo board section then "Open in PCB Editor" at demo.kicad_pcb in Files.

    Next time I'll make a smoother demo...

  • brokensegue 28 minutes ago
    Is this at all related to kicanvas.org
    • ViktorEE 25 minutes ago
      Nope, not at all. This is the original KiCad sources with some modifications to make it run in a browser. As far as I know kicanvas renders PCBs, we can do the whole workflow ( create a schematic => pcb => DRC checks, exports etc ).
  • thenthenthen 1 hour ago
    Small suggestion, it would be nice to see the total size of the download during the first load (sry I am on a slow metered connection).
    • ViktorEE 1 hour ago
      Yea, I'll add it in the next deploy. Thanks! Right now it's about ~30 MB for the big app ( 2 editors + footprint + symbol ).
  • ViktorEE 2 hours ago
    Happy to answer any questions & feel free to reach out ( email in my profile )!
    • JKCalhoun 1 hour ago
      I like all the utility you have already built in.

      My selfish suggestion would be to add support to populate the part numbers for all the components from LCSC's database. JLCPCB wants these numbers in order to assemble a PCB.

      (Currently I use a JLCPCB plug-in to do this in KiCAD.)

      • ViktorEE 1 hour ago
        thanks! one thing we did not port is the plugin system: it's quite hard to run python on the web ( AFAIK pyodide is not enough here ) and I've heard that it will be deprecated in the next version.

        The KiCad editor's state is accessible from the web app, we'll do some kind of plugin system like Figma's or just implement these functions as an overlay. We'll see, thanks for the tip!