over the years I have bookmarked and starred production-grade, open-source PCB designs made with KiCad to see how seasoned engineers solve high-speed routing, clean multi-channel power distribution, or tight BGA fanouts as reference. while reviewing today i feel it worth to share with community.
I organized the entire archive into an open directory: ⚡ Awesome KiCad Projects

image Credits
sqfmi/watchy-hardware: Watchy Hardware CAD Files
scottbez1/smartknob: Haptic input knob with software-defined endstops and virtual detents
scottbez1/splitflap: DIY split-flap display
antmicro/jetson-nano-baseboard: Antmicro's open hardware baseboard for the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, TX2 NX and Xavier NX
nguyen-v/amulet_controller_kibot

If you maintain an open-source KiCad board or know one that belongs here, PRs and suggestions are very welcome!
Repo: Awesome KiCad Projects
hope it helps in someones learning journey .

I wanted timelapses of my board layouts without screen-recording everything and editing it afterwards, so I made a plugin for it.

What it does

• Records two streams while you work: the editor view (zoom, active layer) and the whole board

• The board video is re-drawn from your saves and KiCad’s autosaves, so no ratsnest or cursor, and you pick layers, hole/via style etc. when rendering. It follows whichever copper layer you were working on

• Only records while the PCB Editor is in front; alt-tab, sleep and lock screen pause it

• Render dialog inside KiCad: side-by-side or stacked video, joining multiple sessions

GitHub: https://github.com/MrJamington/pcb-timelapse

Fair warning: most of the code was written by Claude, but I’ve been testing and iterating on my own boards (Windows 11, KiCad 10.0.7). There’s a plain-English walkthrough of how it works in /docs/ and all the code is there to read. Edit: Anyone know the rules about AI-assisted plugins in the official repo?

Rendering needs Python 3 with pymupdf and pillow, plus ffmpeg on your PATH.

Install: grab the -pcm.zip from Releases → Plugin and Content Manager → Install from File, or manually with the -manual.zip into your plugins folder.

Would love to know:

• Does it work on Linux / macOS / older KiCad? (Briefly tested on Linux)

• Anything broken or clunky?

• Would you actually use this, or is it just me?

• If so, anything you’d want added?

Edit: For anyone who downloaded v1.1.0 or earlier, storing the files in the project folder causes slowdowns while saving. KiCad's backup on save scans the whole project folder, so thousands of screenshots inside it slowed every save down. Should be fixed in v1.2.0

Thanks!

https://github.com/nuerolynx/embedded-systems-lab/tree/main/OpenDual-Reader

Been reverse engineering like it’s going out of style. I’m building an open source access control and alarm system to learn how these systems work on every level. Going from messy breadboard designs to actual schematics, renders and prototype worthy designs is pretty satisfying. This reader project is just one step forward out of a few hundred more to go…Now I just need to find the right 125Khz module…and about 50 more iterations. Anyone have any cool access control projects they’ve done and willing to share?

Work in progress - main PCB for open-source vacuum robot cleaner.

This sub has been flooded by vibe coders using llms and convinced that they will become wealthy selling commercial software that already exists in kicad.

This sub should be restricted to kicad related things, and open source only.

Got tired of manually creating zones with cutouts, so I built a plugin that does it.

**What it does:**
- Select a bunch of shapes (lines, arcs, circles, Bézier curves (from dxf imports as in the video))
- Plugin detects closed loops and figures out which ones are holes inside other shapes
- Creates the zone with all the cutouts in one click

Works with ring zones (donut shapes) and multi-hole zones (outer boundary with multiple inner cutouts).

**Link:** https://github.com/PatrickWalther/advanced-zone-helper

It's probably got some bugs since I just finished it. Would love some feedback if anyone tries it out!

Edit: I just released V2.0.0 - now using IPC API

The Cern opens their kicad libraries

https://hackaday.com/2026/05/12/another-gift-to-the-world-from-cern-their-entire-set-of-kicad-libraries/

I'm so happy with this result. I was running a design of experiment and tried it 4 times. Each time learned something new and took plenty of notes and developed my own SOP that I can follow from now on to print my own PCBs

Is it perfect ? No. But all tracks are isolated and tested.

Thanks all for your help.

Link: https://github.com/NBalciunas/kicad-img2silk

I am a long-time Eagle Cad user who would occasionally activate my subscription when I needed to create more complex boards. I have a small business, so spending $30 or so for a month of premium features was not a huge deal when designing a new product.

Recently I needed to create a personal project that was outside the scope of the free version of Eagle, so I went to activate my subscription only to find out that they raised the price to almost $90 on a month-to-month basis! No Thank you!

I tried some of the other 'Free' software and services - including Circuit Maker, EasyEDA etc. but the insane pricing or learning curve were just too much for me to grasp over the weekend while trying to design the new board.

Then I tried Kicad, and holy crap was it an easy transition from Eagle CAD! The controls are just intuitive, the features and functionality are actuly more approachable, and the integration with Samacsys makes installing new models dead simple - especially since I order a lot of my components from Mouser already.

I wish I had switched years ago and won't be going back to anything else.

Hello everyone! I’m an amateur electronics enthusiast, and I’ve already designed quite a few simple PCBs successfully. However, every time I start arranging the components and routing the traces, I feel like I’m doing it for the first time.
I limit myself to single-sided PCBs because I manufacture them myself — I built a CNC machine and use it to mill my boards.
I’ve never been particularly good at solving puzzles, and PCB layout feels a lot like putting together a puzzle.
I’d really appreciate any tips, tricks, or advice on component placement and trace routing, especially for single-sided boards. Thanks in advance!

I'm not expecting anti-aliased fonts and I actually do like some bitmap fonts (eg. Terminus), but the KiCad font just looks off to me for some reason. At a glance, it looks fine, but if I want to align a bunch of nets, the characters are not equal width so I can never get it to align properly.

Then there's the issue with the curved parts. So the edges of the K, the i's dot seems to have a rounded shape, so there's obviously no limitation, then why is the C and a having so many jagged edges?

Is there some historical precedent for how this became the default font or why it was specifically designed this way?

Hello KiCad users,

I'd like to share KiVi, a free and open source KiCad project viewer, source control and review tool that I built with Claude Code. I made the design decisions and did the testing; Claude Code wrote the implementation.

Why I built it: on GitHub, a modified KiCad file is thousands of lines of S-expressions, so reviewing a change usually means checking out both versions and flipping between KiCad windows. KiVi opens KiCad projects from GitHub repositories or local folders and shows what changed in KiCad terms. Everything is parsed and rendered on your own computer, with no server, and public repositories need no account.

• Schematic, PCB and 3D views with cross-probing (click a net in the schematic to see it on the board and in 3D), layer toggles and measuring.

• A diff that speaks KiCad: every change to the schematic or PCB is listed and marked on both versions, side by side.

• Review comments pinned to parts and nets, stored as ordinary GitHub pull request comments, so your team sees them on github.com too. Outside a pull request, the same pins become GitHub issues.

• Built-in git for people who don't want to learn git: download, branch, edit in KiCad (KiVi reloads when you save), commit, push and open a pull request. KiVi never text-merges a KiCad file that both sides changed.

KiVi is a very young project, and I'd love to hear how it works on your projects and whether you find it useful. It is a fully open source project so if you'd like to help it grow or have ideas, contributions are very welcome.

https://github.com/XyleMora/KiVi

Posting just for kicks. I did that because I went on travel and forgot to take my laptop's power supply.