TRACE Boardviewer

TRACE Boardviewer in one minute

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A free, offline boardviewer at work on a real open design: one search across the board, the schematic and the PDF, cross-probing between board and schematic, and a pin note with a measured value.

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59.6 seconds · 1280 × 800 · no sound · MP4, 1.1 MB

What happens in the video

  1. 0:00TRACE Boardviewer: a free, offline boardviewer and repair workspaceThe Pico 2 C board is open in the Workshop layout.
  2. 0:07Search across the board, the schematic and the PDF at onceThe net USB_DP is typed into the search. The results list it on the board, in the schematic and in the PDF text.
  3. 0:14Cross-probe: the same net highlighted on the board and in the schematicThe split view shows the board and the KiCad schematic with USB_DP highlighted in both.
  4. 0:22Read the plotted schematic PDF: search the text and jump to every matchThe plotted schematic PDF opens in the Documents tab. A text search for USB_DP jumps from match to match.
  5. 0:35Pin notes with measured values, saved with the boardThe USB-C connector J3 is selected. Its VBUS pin gets a note with a measured voltage of 5.1 V, saved with the board.
  6. 0:54Free and open source (MIT). Windows portable EXE. macOS experimental.Closing card.

Click a time to jump there. The on-screen captions are also available as a subtitle track (CC in the player).

About the design shown

The demo uses Pico 2 C from the project-piCo repository: a KiCad PCB, its KiCad schematics and the plotted schematic PDF, published under the WTFPL licence. The note text and the 5.1 V value were typed by hand for this demonstration; TRACE never fills in measured values. The captions and the pointer in the video were added for the recording and are not part of the app.

Screenshots

A 28 MB KiCad board with one net highlighted.TRACE 1.2.0 · Jetson Nano baseboard by Antmicro (Apache-2.0) · 28 MB KiCad PCB, net 3V3_SYS highlighted
An EAGLE board and its schematic side by side.TRACE 1.2.0 · RedBoard by SparkFun (CC BY-SA 4.0) · EAGLE board with its EAGLE schematic

More screenshots are in the gallery on the home page. The getting started guide explains each step.

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