Thingiverse, but for KiCad subcircuits.
CircuitSnips is a community-driven platform for sharing and discovering KiCad subcircuits. A place where engineers can share their proven circuit designs and help others avoid reinventing the wheel.
The comparison to Thingiverse is deliberate: this is for side projects and quick prototypes, not production designs. If you want to throw an ESP on a board with an AMS1117 and an MCP2515 for a weekend project, these circuits are a reasonable starting point. You should always check everything yourself, but if you're repeatedly throwing boards together with the same jellybean parts, why not have a library to pull from?
Copy circuit in KiCad → Paste on CircuitSnips → Someone else searches → Copies to their project. That's it.
As an electronics engineer, I found myself repeatedly designing the same common circuits - voltage regulators, protection circuits, signal conditioning stages, etc. While these patterns exist across thousands of projects, there wasn't a standardized way to share and reuse them within KiCad.
Core Functionality
- Interactive schematic preview using KiCanvas (WebGL viewer)
- Copy to clipboard with embedded attribution
- Download as .kicad_sch file
- GitHub OAuth authentication
- 8 open hardware licenses (CERN-OHL-S-2.0, MIT, Apache-2.0, GPL-3.0, etc.)
Discovery & Search
- Weighted full-text search (prioritizes tags > title > description)
- Search autocomplete with live preview
- Browse by popular tags/categories
- Filter by license, component count, quality score
- Sort by relevance, most copied, recent, or favorites
Community Features
- Threaded comments with up to 3 levels of replies
- Like/unlike comments
- Edit and delete your own comments
- Favorite circuits to save for later
- User profiles with bio, website, and avatar
- View count and copy count tracking
Circuit Management
- Upload circuits via paste or file
- Edit circuit metadata (title, description, tags, license, visibility)
- Delete your own circuits
- Private/public visibility toggle
- Automatic thumbnail generation (light and dark themes)
KiCanvas Enhancements
- Theme control from the page (required for thumbnail generation)
- Box selection to copy subsections of circuits
- Particularly useful for bulk-uploaded full sheets - select just the subcircuit you need
Stack
- Frontend: Next.js 14, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
- Backend: Next.js API routes (RESTful)
- Database & Auth: Supabase (PostgreSQL)
- Storage: Cloudflare R2 (thumbnails and schematics)
- Schematic Viewer: KiCanvas (WebGL)
- Hosting: Vercel
Key Technical Challenges
KiCad File Format: KiCad uses S-Expressions for both file storage and clipboard data. The KiCanvas viewer wasn't set up to handle 'snips' - when snips are uploaded, they need to be wrapped in everything required to make a valid kicad_sch file. References to components on other sheets are blocked to ensure compatibility.
Search: Full-text search across circuit descriptions and component lists with weighted ranking.
Preview Generation: Visual thumbnails of circuit schematics in both light and dark themes.
A platform like this is useless without content, but nobody will contribute to an empty site. To break this chicken-and-egg problem, GitHub was scraped for kicad_sch files, classified by version and license, with attribution determined.
The kicad_sch S-Expressions were flattened using a tokenizer, then fed into Gemini Flash 2.5 to extract and rank subcircuits. This gave us 4,230+ schematic files with correct licenses and attribution, at an API cost of under £10.
The scraped collection includes circuits from automotive projects, medical devices, and hardware that's been to space. The classifier grades circuits on quality, which affects search ranking. There's a toggle to hide bulk uploads entirely from browse and search for users who prefer curated content only.
If users don't wish for their schematics to be included, there's a one-click report that doesn't require login.
- KiCad plugin integration
- Automated testing and validation of uploaded circuits
- Support for other EDA tools
- Analytics dashboard (copy tracking, engagement metrics)
- Email notifications for comments and replies
- Circuit versioning and revision history
- "I Built This" section for user-submitted build photos
- Collections/playlists for organizing circuits
git clone https://github.com/MichaelAyles/kicad-library.git
cd kicad-library
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local
# Add your Supabase URL and keys to .env.local
npm run devDatabase setup: Create a Supabase project, then run supabase/setup.sql in the SQL editor. It's idempotent - safe to run multiple times.
Fork it, make your changes, send a PR. Use conventional commits if you can.
Before committing:
npm run buildshould passnpm run lintshould pass
Platform code: MIT
Uploaded circuits: Users pick from CERN-OHL-S-2.0, MIT, CC-BY-4.0, CC-BY-SA-4.0, GPL-3.0, Apache-2.0, TAPR-OHL-1.0, or BSD-2-Clause
- Live site: https://circuitsnips.com
- Blog post: Building CircuitSnips
- Report bugs: GitHub Issues
Questions or feedback? Open an issue or reach out at [email protected]