A Free Boardview Viewer in Your Browser, With Linked Schematics and Known-Good Readings

A boardview file is a map of a circuit board: where each part and pin sits, on which side, and which net connects it. Put one next to the schematic and you can follow a signal from a chip to a test point.

Most boardview software is a desktop program. That’s fine at your own bench, but not on the shop’s locked-down PC, on a borrowed laptop, or when you only want a quick look at a board. So we built one that runs in a browser tab.

Open the board viewer → It starts with an open-source sample board, the Glasgow Interface Explorer, so you can try it before opening your own file.

What it does

• Both sides at once. The bottom folds out under the top, so a pin through the board sits straight across. Switch to one side any time, flip, mirror or rotate.
• Trace a net. Click a pin and the net lights up, with lines joining its pins and a name on every part it touches. On ground, the lines go to the nearest pins, which is where a probe goes.
• Linked schematic. Open the PDF beside the board, or in its own window on a second monitor. Click a part or net on one to find it on the other.
• Known-good readings. For boards in OpenBoardData, hover over a pin to see its diode, voltage and resistance values.
• Diagnostic notes. The same archive’s repair notes open in the viewer, with their parts and nets as links to the board.
• Trace power. The Power AI tab sorts Apple rails into startup stages and draws them on the board. On other boards, or for the real order, copy a ready-made prompt to your own AI with your schematic and paste the answer back.
• Your own readings. Type in what your meter shows and see the plain difference from the known-good value.
• Ask. An AI assistant answers from the part or net you’ve selected and suggests what to measure next. Answers that pass its checks go into a shared library, so the next person gets them at once. How that works. It’s a test for now, with 10 new AI questions a day.

Which files it opens

BRD, BDV, BVR, CAD, CST, GenCAD, KiCad, Eagle, Altium ASCII and sets of ASC files. Some of these have only been tested on files we made, so tell us if yours fails. A ZIP opens too, with the schematic inside it. Encrypted FZ, CAE and XZZ files open with their key, which you supply: we don’t provide keys. Binary Allegro, ODB++, Fabmaster, HyperLynx and Teboview files don’t open yet. If you need one, the email link under the viewer goes straight to us. We read the requests and add a few as we go.

Your files stay on your computer

Boards and schematics are read in your browser tab and never uploaded. There’s no account. Close the tab and they’re gone. The one thing that leaves your computer is what you choose to send with Ask: your question and the selected data, never the file.

Credit where it’s due

Most of the board readers are a TypeScript port of OpenBoardView, which is MIT licensed. PDF pages are drawn with Mozilla’s PDF.js. The readings and notes are the work of OpenBoardData’s contributors, shared under the Open Database License.

This page is meant for a quick look on any computer. For full-time bench work, FlexBV is the desktop program that works with OpenBoardData, with more formats and bench features.

The viewer doesn’t include board files. Bring your own.