KiCad… In The Browser?

KiCad is a useful tool for designing printed circuit boards, but it’s of no use to you if you can’t install it on the computer you’re on. To get around that, [Akshay Rukade] has whipped up a browser-based alternative to help keep you working in less permissive environments. Quite simply, ZiroEDA is a TypeScript port of KiCad 10.0.6’s C++ source code.

You get the schematic editor, the PCB editor, the interactive router, and the electrical and design rule checkers all running in a browser. It can open.kicad_pro files as you’d expect, and you can edit and save them as you would if you were working in standard KiCad directly. [Akshay] reports that KiCad’s own kicad-cli was used for compatibility testing, and that zone fills came out vertex-identical from ZiroEDA versus using KiCad itself.

With that said, the project is still a work in progress, and some dialogs from the original software are still missing. Projects are said to be end-to-end encrypted, but you’ll hopefully lose your job quickly if you try and put anything important to national security through a tool like this.