KiCad designs
A KiCad design is a media item that the reader sees drawn — a schematic they can pan and zoom, a board they can inspect layer by layer — instead of a file they have to download and open in KiCad first.
Why it earns its place
For an electronics firm the design is the documentation. Before this, a page could only offer the file, which meant the reader needed KiCad installed before the page told them anything. A customer comparing two modules, a technician tracing a fault, a buyer checking a connector: none of them have KiCad, and none of them should need it.
Adding one
Upload the design as a media item of the KiCad design type, then place it on a page like any other media — in a field, in a layout, or through a listing.
Four kinds of upload are accepted:
| Upload | Good for |
|---|---|
.kicad_sch |
one schematic sheet |
.kicad_pcb |
one board |
.kicad_pro |
not on its own — see below |
.zip |
a whole project, and the only way a hierarchical schematic works |
A hierarchical schematic has to travel as a project
A schematic with sub-sheets refers to them by relative path, so the sheets only resolve when they arrive together. Zip the project folder and upload that. A project file on its own holds neither the sheets nor the board, so the platform says so rather than drawing an empty page.
Choosing what the reader sees
The choice belongs to the placement, not to the uploaded item, so one design serves a product page, a documentation page and a comparison without being uploaded three times. On the display row you set:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Show | the schematic, the board, or both with a panel to switch |
| Board layers | which layers the printed PDF contains; empty means every layer |
| Printing | whether this placement offers a PDF at all |
Showing less really does give less
A placement set to Schematic only does not merely hide the board — the board's address is not in the page at all. What a placement withholds cannot be reached by looking at the page source, which matters when a firm publishes a schematic but keeps its layout to itself.
There is no light/dark choice, and that is on purpose
The viewer draws on a dark canvas. Its engine takes a theme name but, in the version the platform ships, draws the same picture whichever theme it is given — so the platform does not offer a choice it cannot keep. The reader still has the viewer's own controls.
Printing
Where the server can, the reader gets a PDF of what the placement shows, with the layers the placement chose. Printing is the one part of this feature that can be missing: it needs KiCad's own command-line tool installed on the server.
When the tool is not there, the print action is simply not offered — there is never a button that fails. Configuration → KiCad says which of the two your installation is, and why.
Everything else works without it
Designs are still drawn, still downloaded, still searched, still translated. Only the PDF depends on the tool.
What it will not do
- KiCad 5 and older. The viewer reads KiCad 6 and later. An older file is named as such and stays downloadable.
- Gerbers and fabrication outputs. Out of scope on purpose.
- Editing. The platform shows and prints a design; it never writes one.
- A board in three dimensions. Export STEP or GLB from KiCad and use 3D models, which already does exactly that.
The download never goes away
A drawn design is still a file. The download sits beside the drawing, and a firm that would rather show a design than hand it over can switch the download off on the media item — the drawing stays, the file stops being offered.
This also covers the awkward cases honestly: a design the viewer cannot read, a file too large to draw in a browser, a browser without the right support. In each one the reader gets a sentence saying what happened and a working download, never an empty frame.