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I wanted to show off some software I built to help bring collaboration closer to software such as KiCad and FreeCAD. It’s designed to be production ready for companies and individuals to share and collaborate on electrical and mechanical projects as teams.
I also posted on the FreeCAD subreddit and that post has some more information about the project!
Ki365 is a collaboration tool for KiCad and other CAD formats. KiCanvas parses KiCad formats and outputs a web view of the results. Ki365 uses KiCanvas as one of the tools to bring projects to the web.
It would be nice to have a website dedicated to Open Sourced projects with KiCad, similar to what other vendors have. I would not expect (nor want) direct online editing, but viewing PCB’s with KiCanvas (and/or Interactive HTML bom). Git integration in KiCad is also slowly coming (It’s hidden in KiCad V8 because it’s not ready yet).
Compared to a tool like:
… which also has keyword search, quickly loading a project / schematic / PCB to get an idea in which state it is would be nice.
On those other sites (circuitmaker, easy EDA, etc) I see a lot of forks and thus the same (or very similar) projects, and half created designs that never got finished. That is understandable and OK of course. I guess people just want to experiment a bit with the user interface to see if it works well. If it would be possible to collapse all such forks into a single return after searching, it makes the search results easier to interpret. When you’re interested in a certain project, you can then look further to the state of those forks.
@paulvdh, yes that would be nice to have. The current scope is for making team collaboration easier. This includes viewing schematics, BOM, and project artifacts on team controlled repositories.
I definitely see the value of having an online platform for project discovery. That will likely be added sometime in the future.
Thank you for the project link. I will look into their process and evaluate integration with Ki365.
KiCanvas is already implemented into Ki365. I will likely integrate interactive HTML bom as a temporary solution to view component locations during assembly but I am likely to replace it with a custom implementation in the future.