Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Thea and I’m creating an open source, interactive web viewer for KiCAD’s files and I’m looking for folks to financially sponsor my work on this. There’s no hard sell here- I’ll tell you what I’m trying to accomplish and what I’ve done so far and you can decide if you’d like to financially contribute so I can spend more time on this.
UPDATE: I’ve reached my goal! You’re still welcome to contribute if you’d like to grab early access or support my work.
The schematic viewer, showing selection, information, and deep linking
The schematic viewer, showing selection, information, and deep linking
The board viewer, showing layer visibility and zooming.
The board viewer, showing layer visibility and zooming.
KiCanvas lets you view, embed, and explore KiCAD’s schematics, boards, footprints, and library symbols within your web browser. You don’t need to do any exporting, printing, or install any plugins as KiCanvas reads KiCAD files directly. KiCanvas is interactive- you can click symbols and footprints to view all the data assigned to those items in KiCAD.
KiCanvas is intentionally designed for educational and informational use cases. For example, you could add schematics into an article describing how a circuit works. Your readers could click on symbols and learn more about them, and even copy and paste the schematics right into their KiCAD project. You could embed an interactive view of a board in a build guide, so that people can quickly find where components need to be placed. If you’re looking for feedback on your design, you can share your design and others can view it right in their browser without needing to download anything.
KiCanvas will be free and open source (MIT license). It is not a product and not software as a service. It is primarily a web component library. I will not be running servers, hosting user content, or anything like that. KiCanvas’s current state is somewhere between a very advanced proof of concept and an alpha release- it can show both schematics and boards but it’s missing a few details and needs those critical finishing touches. I would like to raise at least $1,200/mo in sponsorships to spend the next 4-6 months building KiCanvas into a polished, high-quality library.
The primary goals for the initial, minimum viable release of KiCanvas are: