Show HN: KiCad in the Browser

(demo.pcbjam.com)

44 points | by ViktorEE 4 hours ago

7 comments

  • xrd 45 minutes ago
    I love that Firefox is the best.

    I don't use kicad. But, this project, as a web-first version of kicad, seems like it offers the best opportunities to create a shared learning community. Is that part of the long term goal?

    I would love to experiment with kicad, but I learn best through watching others and asking questions. Can I do that with this? Is there a way I could "watch" other sessions as the build progresses? Or, chat about what I see there with other people interested in learning and teaching?

    Very nice work!

    • ViktorEE 41 minutes ago
      I love that too, the sad part is that ~30% of our visitors ( from Plausible ) are on Safari which is... Not good :) No threads for ya there. At least it works.

      Yes! That's the plan for "marketing". And yes, we'll have to usual "follow" features ( without the popups etc which doesn't really suit your usecase ), chat ( maybe voice chat? ).

      Thanks!!

  • karlkloss 58 minutes ago
    I can totally see pcb manufacturers like JLC integrating this into their websites, with a set of customized design rules and an order button.
    • ViktorEE 55 minutes ago
      Yea, it makes sense. JLC already own EasyEDA, it's an interesting matchup for sure.
      • IgorPartola 26 minutes ago
        I initially found EasyEDA to be easier to use especially with auto routing. But KiCAD is definitely more powerful.
        • ViktorEE 7 minutes ago
          It's on the "roadmap", someday I'll take some time to take a look at the autorouting situtation. I have a few ideas.
  • ViktorEE 1 hour 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...

  • thenthenthen 2 hours 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 2 hours 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 ).
  • varun_ch 1 hour 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 1 hour 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!

      • thegrim33 55 minutes ago
        Looking at the long list of the things you had to do to get this working .. and you couldn't "find" the energy to write some text for the landing page yourself? For a project you want people to buy from you? You supposedly put in all that effort, and built these sites around it, and building a business around it, and you couldn't deal with writing descriptions of it yourself? Seriously?
        • ViktorEE 51 minutes ago
          Yea, it sounds worse than it felt in that light lol. You have a point. In hindsight I should've taken a day or two for writing a good copy, I was just very impatient and wanted to push this out.

          To be fair, this is not "the project" yet, just a first preview. I'm an engineer, doing things like this is "work", optimizing the bundle size is fun. Sorry.

        • 0x62 23 minutes ago
          Eh. This isn’t a finished project. Designing and writing marketing content requires a completely different headspace to when you’re working the product, and isn’t something you can context switch easily.

          I only have a problem with obvious AI marketing pages when it’s a finished product that’s on sale.

          • ViktorEE 9 minutes ago
            To my former self two days ago: if you work almost a year on something take two days to polish a demo.
  • brokensegue 1 hour ago
    Is this at all related to kicanvas.org
    • ViktorEE 1 hour 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 ).
  • ViktorEE 3 hours ago
    Happy to answer any questions & feel free to reach out ( email in my profile )!
    • JKCalhoun 2 hours 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 2 hours 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!