New way to view and share KiCad designs on the web

Software
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Hello!

I wanted to share a project I have been working on for the last several months called http://eyrie.io that we hope may be useful to many of you!

A long time collaborate of mine and I created some new software that lets you view and share KiCad schematics and layouts in your web browser.

Here’s an example of a pretty famous KiCad design in Eyrie:

The designs can be in GitHub, Dropbox or you can drag/drop files onto your web browser. Currently it works with Chrome, Safari and Firefox on desktop, tablet and mobile browsers.

We are using WebGL to render and most designs (even complex ones) can be zoomed and panned at high frame rates, even on mobile devices!

We added support for Octopart so you can augment your designs with detailed information about your specific design intent, as well as links directly to manufacturers and datasheets.

Our goal for Eyrie was to make an easy way to share and discuss designs on social media, forums, emails and messaging. You can easily post URLs to specific views or comments in a KiCad design.

Unlike emailing around attachments, you can control access to your designs in Eyrie, or choose to leave them public. You can even make your designs browsable on Eyrie without making the underlying KiCad files downloadable.

If you use Eyrie with GitHub or Dropbox, the Eyrie URLs you share will always reflect the latest versions of your designs.

Finally, Eyrie is FREE during beta, so please give it a try!

We would love to hear what you think. Honestly, harsh criticism of the idea or execution is just (if not more) useful than praise, so if you have the time we’d really appreciate it!

Best,

Jeremy & Zak

PS. We’re on Twitter at @eyrieio if you want to keep up with our latest progress.

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It looks interesting, somehow I was expecting to be able to comment on individual traces and components: a tool for PCB reviews. Is something like this planned?

I am also a little curious about the people behind it. Are you a two person company? A startup? Trying to grow this to a lifestyle business or bigger than that?

EDIT: The HackRF board linked has stopped loading for me (Linux Firefox)

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Thanks for checking it out!

In comments you can reference specific items from the design by using a hashtag notation (i.e. #GND). A good example of this is on the Bluelight board:

We’ve got lots of ideas on enhancing this but wanted to gauge interest in this use case before going nuts implementing it.

If startup and lifestyle company were my only two choices I guess I would say we are a startup :slight_smile: We are interested in a number of software and hardware projects, but we’re not pursuing the typical venture backed scalable startup path. For more background you can check out a short post I wrote up here:

(I’ll post the link below due to forum restrictions)

Sorry to hear that the board stopped working for you! Would be super helpful to learn more about that if you had a moment, either through the in-app feedback tool, support chat or posting here. Any errors reported in the JavaScript console would be super helpful.

Thanks again for taking the time to check us out!

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Here’s the link to the brief article I wrote up on the impetus behind Eyrie:

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Thanks for your answer. I did a little debugging and it seems uBlock origin is blocking your analytics (mixpanel.js) which causes an error and crashes the app.

viewer.js:221 Uncaught ReferenceError: mixpanel is not defined

As an aside, looks like you are not setting NODE_ENV = production when bundling React as I am seeing the dev tools message in the console as well. Setting that to productiion should give some performance improvements (not that there seem to be any issues, it runs very smoothly on my machines).

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This looks great! A neat tool indeed!

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That is great info thanks! Will fix that up so blocked analytics does not crash the tool.

Good point on increasing performance with production builds. We opted for deploying the dev builds for now so we can more easily work with early users to debug issues.

Great to hear that initial performance seems reasonable for you.

Looking forward to any additional feedback you might have as we fix up these initial blockers!

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Ok, tested a fix using uBlock and Eyrie should no longer crash if analytics are blocked.

Please let us know if you experience any other problems!

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How do I meta scroll?

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Depending on your keyboard / operating system this would be holding a modifier key on your keyboard like “command” on the Mac or the windows key on a PC and then using the scroll wheel/trackpad.

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Thanks. That’s the first time I’ve seen scrolling like that. And each time I finish scrolling the windows start meny pops up.

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Really neat. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to zoom in or out with FireFox (v50.0) on Win10. I was, however, able to zoom in and out with Chrome (v54.0.2840.99 m) on the same computer. (Though, Win10 kept on registering the release of the Windows key and popped up my start menu each time…)

Without creating an account I don’t see how to load designs into the engine. Is it as simple as uploading/linking to the .kicad_pcb file?

I see you mention the service being free during beta. Is there any plan for how much this service will charge in the future? Different tiers for hobbyists vs. companies?

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Thanks for the feedback, I think we have some work to do on windows!

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Yes we have some work to do on windows getting our keys under control. Ideal would be pinch to zoom but that’s not yet supported on desktop.

We’ve been mulling over pricing strategies but I can’t imagine we would ever charge students or open source users.

One of the things we have debated is prompting users to associate a license with their design. Open source licenses would not require paid accounts while commercial or custom licenses might.

We’re also just debating keeping it free and working on additional features that require paid accounts.

Very interested to hear your feedback on these ideas!

And yes, it’s as easy as drag/dropping layout and schematic files onto the browser. Or selecting them in GitHub or Dropbox!

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This is an interesting pricing model. I don’t think that I’ve heard of this one, and probably wouldn’t have though of it. But that said, I’d be hopeful that it would be a sustainable (and easy to police) model for you. I haven’t tried to think through the ramifications, but I like the idea of it.

Ah, the schematic file for the component fields that the pcb file doesn’t retain… Oh, I just discovered the schematic button. I suppose the project schematic library is also necessary to properly display the schematic.

Would it be possible to have hints pop up for the buttons when the cursor is hovering over them? The “shuffle” icon (that’s what it would be in a music player) isn’t intuitive to me for switching between schematic and pcb.

I don’t know how much you want to promote other sites (nor if they have a decent API), but would it be possible to have some sort of link that pre-fills in at least some of the fields on http://pcbshopper.com/ (dimensions, layer count, silkscreen location (None, Top, Bottom, or Both), minimum design trace/space, minimum design drill size, and quantity of gold fingers)? The end user would still be responsible for generating gerbers (or just sending the pcb file for OSHPark). But this would help getting quick quotes.

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I don’t know about it’s usefulness, I’m sure some will find it useful while others won’t. Some would probably even be willing to pay for it while others won’t. But regardless, it’s an impressive effort! Well done!

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Good suggestion on the tooltips. That’s a missing feature for sure.

Will investigate and think on the ordering API suggestion!

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Very nice tool! Good job!

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We just changed the way pan and zoom work, should be much more intuitive. Click drag to pan and mouse wheel to zoom. No windows key / modifier keys necessary. Thanks again for the feedback!

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