Professional board design built for iPad, touch, and Apple Pencil. Place real parts, route real boards, verify your work, and send it to fabrication — without fighting desktop CAD.
The actual app — an open-hardware nRF52840 board, opened from its KiCad file, routed nets and live rule checking on screen.
Direct manipulation on the canvas itself — not dialogs about the canvas. Selection, placement, routing, and editing all happen where your hands already are.
Route where you want it to go.Tap intent points with the Pencil; the router refines instead of refusing. Tap back to undo a bad leg.
Move the part. The traces clean themselves up.Clean Move reconnects routing into a result that looks intentional.
Tap the wire you meant.Copper-first selection: a trace crossing a part body wins the tap, and the whole net lights up.
Exact when you need exact.Type a coordinate, work in mm or mils, snap to a real grid. Precision is a tap away, not a mode away.
The recurring difference isn’t prettier commands — it’s work you simply don’t do anymore.
Place the MCU. Get the circuitry it needs.Decoupling caps, crystal, pull-ups, balun — offered pin-bound and placed at valid pads. Antennas are asked about per board, never assumed.
See the footprint before you place it.Function-first catalog with real manufacturer part numbers and inspectable land patterns — and pads you can edit, add, or draw straight onto the board.
Missing part? Feed it the datasheet.BETALand patterns derived from the PDF’s vector geometry — instead of you transcribing the drawing pad by pad.
Say what the copper should be, not how.Stackup with impedance targets expressed as intent; routing rules follow the net class.
A workflow isn’t done because the final button exists. Discover → inspect → decide → act → verify — the product is built around that standard, and where it isn’t met yet, it says so.
Inspect real geometry.Actual footprints, actual clearances, integer-nanometre coordinates displayed in your units.
The router tells you why, not just no.Blocked routes explain themselves and offer to make room.
Rules that ride along.Net classes, clearance, and manufacturing rules live in the workspace rail.
Board-wide DRC, live.Ambient checking with a problems surface, reading your board’s own design rules. Six rule families verified item-for-item against KiCad 10 — clearance, board-edge, courtyard, annular ring, mask bridge, silk height.
Export asks what you’re ordering — not which of eleven file formats you’d like to configure.
Know what you’re sending to the board house.One validated zip: Gerbers, drill files, BOM, and pick-and-place. Geometry is checked before a single file is written.
Stale copper never ships.If a pour is out of date, export refuses and names it — it will not silently rewrite your board.
Part numbers included.The BOM carries LCSC part numbers, ready for assembly quoting.
And it’s still a KiCad board.Everything you export opens in desktop KiCad, because it never stopped being a .kicad_pcb.
Upload a logo. Get back a legal board where every dark pixel is a real, orderable component — this bolt is 1,189 actual parts (1,022 resistors, 167 red LEDs), daisy-chained with 1,293 real copper traces, escaping to vias at the board edge. Not a silkscreen print: nets, pads, drills, and an LCSC-numbered BOM.
A working lab experiment, not yet in the product — shown because it's exactly the kind of thing the engine underneath makes possible.
You’re an engineer; you’d find out anyway. This list is generated from our own capability audits, and shipping features off it is part of the roadmap.
Watch this list shrink. When a gap closes, its row comes off — that’s the deal.
Free is the real editor — real routing, real rules, real precision, full KiCad compatibility. Nothing about your PCB is ever made worse because you're not paying. The limits are about scale and convenience, and they're honest ones.
What we never paywall: DRC correctness, routing legality, precision, units, layer count, file integrity, KiCad compatibility, or access to your own files. If you stop paying, you fall back to Free gracefully — every board is preserved, you pick which two stay active, and everything stays exportable. Subscription state controls convenience and services, never ownership.
Draft pricing, pending approval. Subscriptions are not live — the app is pre-release. Paid features ride out network or billing outages on a cached entitlement; the editor itself never needed a connection in the first place.
PCB Canvas is in private development. Leave your email and you’ll be first in line for the beta.
DRAFT: waitlist backend not deployed. No data is collected by this preview page.