7 comments

  • xrd1 hour ago
    I love that Firefox is the best.<p>I don&#x27;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?<p>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 &quot;watch&quot; other sessions as the build progresses? Or, chat about what I see there with other people interested in learning and teaching?<p>Very nice work!
    • ViktorEE1 hour 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.<p>Yes! That&#x27;s the plan for &quot;marketing&quot;. And yes, we&#x27;ll have to usual &quot;follow&quot; features ( without the popups etc which doesn&#x27;t really suit your usecase ), chat ( maybe voice chat? ).<p>Thanks!!
  • karlkloss1 hour 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.
    • ViktorEE1 hour ago
      Yea, it makes sense. JLC already own EasyEDA, it&#x27;s an interesting matchup for sure.
      • IgorPartola1 hour ago
        I initially found EasyEDA to be easier to use especially with auto routing. But KiCAD is definitely more powerful.
        • ViktorEE45 minutes ago
          It&#x27;s on the &quot;roadmap&quot;, someday I&#x27;ll take some time to take a look at the autorouting situtation. I have a few ideas.
  • ViktorEE2 hours ago
    To open a demo board click &quot;Open&quot; in the Projects&#x2F;Demo board section then &quot;Open in PCB Editor&quot; at demo.kicad_pcb in Files.<p>Next time I&#x27;ll make a smoother demo...
    • sixtyj24 minutes ago
      I have tried to open demo on mobile and it fails (iOS 18.6.2). Safari browser returns “there was a repeated problem with the page…”
      • ViktorEE20 minutes ago
        Yeah, this is not optimized to mobile yet. My Iphone 13 pro did open once, didn&#x27;t check further. Sometimes it works if you open it on a new tab ( memory issues ).
  • thenthenthen3 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).
    • ViktorEE3 hours ago
      Yea, I&#x27;ll add it in the next deploy. Thanks! Right now it&#x27;s about ~30 MB for the big app ( 2 editors + footprint + symbol ).
  • varun_ch2 hours 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.
    • ViktorEE2 hours ago
      You&#x27;re wrong! It was two prompts! Jokes aside, you&#x27;re right. I wanted to have something up quickly. Before the real launch ( and not just this demo ) I&#x27;ll write one by hand, I&#x27;m against AI written copy &#x2F; blogposts, just could not find the headspace to focus.<p>Again, thanks for the feedback, I&#x27;ll take it!
      • thegrim331 hour ago
        Looking at the long list of the things you had to do to get this working .. and you couldn&#x27;t &quot;find&quot; 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&#x27;t deal with writing descriptions of it yourself? Seriously?
        • ViktorEE1 hour ago
          Yea, it sounds worse than it felt in that light lol. You have a point. In hindsight I should&#x27;ve taken a day or two for writing a good copy, I was just very impatient and wanted to push this out.<p>To be fair, this is not &quot;the project&quot; yet, just a first preview. I&#x27;m an engineer, doing things like this is &quot;work&quot;, optimizing the bundle size is fun. Sorry.
          • mlyle0 minutes ago
            Please think about how this can be set up to track upstream Kicad. Hopefully you have a small adaptation layer and some clever build, not wholesale changes to the code.<p>I teach HS classes where a lot of students end up doing some pretty serious PCB layout. We already benefit from MCAD that runs in the browser-- KiCad running in the browser would be a major boon to reduce setup requirements for student computers.<p>(Thinking about how this could play with revision control and KiCad documents in Git repositories would be really helpful for my use case, too).<p>Congratulations- this looks really slick!
        • 0x621 hour 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.<p>I only have a problem with obvious AI marketing pages when it’s a finished product that’s on sale.
          • ViktorEE47 minutes ago
            To my former self two days ago: if you work almost a year on something take two days to polish a demo.
  • brokensegue2 hours ago
    Is this at all related to kicanvas.org
    • ViktorEE2 hours 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 =&gt; pcb =&gt; DRC checks, exports etc ).
  • ViktorEE4 hours ago
    Happy to answer any questions &amp; feel free to reach out ( email in my profile )!
    • JKCalhoun3 hours ago
      I like all the utility you have already built in.<p>My selfish suggestion would be to add support to populate the part numbers for all the components from LCSC&#x27;s database. JLCPCB wants these numbers in order to assemble a PCB.<p>(Currently I use a JLCPCB plug-in to do this in KiCAD.)
      • ViktorEE3 hours ago
        thanks! one thing we did not port is the plugin system: it&#x27;s quite hard to run python on the web ( AFAIK pyodide is not enough here ) and I&#x27;ve heard that it will be deprecated in the next version.<p>The KiCad editor&#x27;s state is accessible from the web app, we&#x27;ll do some kind of plugin system like Figma&#x27;s or just implement these functions as an overlay. We&#x27;ll see, thanks for the tip!