PCBJam

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PCBJam puts the KiCad circuit-board design suite in a browser tab. It is the real KiCad compiled to WebAssembly, not a viewer or a rewrite, so you get the schematic editor, the PCB editor, design-rule checks, the 3D view and Gerber and drill export. Then it adds what desktop KiCad lacks: several people editing the same board live, shareable invite links, and public projects anyone can open. It is for hardware engineers, makers and teams who want to review or route a board without passing zip files around. PCBJam was started as a hobby project by Viktor, an ex-electrical engineer and CTO of Emergence Engineering, a small Hungarian dev shop known for rich-text editors and CRDTs. Getting a huge C++ desktop app to run on the web meant porting wxWidgets to WebAssembly and writing a new WebGL backend for KiCad's graphics layer. By his own account he did much of that with Claude Code: Claude filled in the missing pieces of the wxWidgets port and wrote the WebGL renderer, which was checked feature by feature against native screenshots until the two matched. The Show HN post drew strong interest from the KiCad community, and the team publishes a frank weekly devblog. Highlights: • The full KiCad editors in the browser: schematic, PCB layout, DRC, 3D viewer and Gerber export • Real-time collaboration, with several people routing and reviewing the same board • Reads and writes native KiCad files, so you can switch to desktop KiCad at any time • Invite links with an expiry date and a usage limit, plus public projects shared by URL • Viewer mode on Android phones and tablets • A no-account demo project to try it instantly PCBJam has a free plan with unlimited public projects, up to seven private projects and three people on private work. Pro costs US$10 a month (US$100 a year) for unlimited private projects and more storage, and Team and Enterprise plans are coming. It runs in Chrome, Edge and Firefox on desktop and Chromebook. Safari support depends on an upcoming WebAssembly feature from Apple.

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