Improving My Demos#

Over the last week I have mainly been working on other things: business admin, planning, and some improvements to the Demos and Tools section of my website.

Business admin is not especially exciting, but it has to be done. The more interesting part of the week was spending some time improving a couple of technical demos that are useful both as website content and as practical tools for my own work.

The first block of work was improving the Gerber viewer.

This is a Vite-based in-browser tool that takes a ZIP file of Gerber files and displays the PCB layers in the browser. It is currently focused mainly on Gerbers generated by KiCad, as that is what I use for my own board designs, but it should be possible to extend it to support Gerbers from other EDA packages in the future if needed.

At the moment the viewer has been tested with four-layer boards, and the underlying structure should hopefully allow for boards with more layers as well, although I would treat that as untested for now.

This makes it a useful technical demo, but it is also genuinely practical. I can use it to display the layers of my own boards on this website and, later on, on a more formal documentation site when I get that properly set up.

It is currently available on my Protoworks website under the Demos & Tools section.

The second block of work was creating an in-browser calculation workbench for common electrical engineering calculations.

The idea is to provide a simple tool that can calculate values for common formulas such as Ohm’s law, resistors in series and parallel, capacitors in series and parallel, PCB track width, and other useful electronics calculations.

It is not intended to be an exhaustive catalogue of every possible electrical engineering formula, but it is a solid starting point and I will be adding more calculations over time if I find myself needing them or I receive a request.

One part of the design that I am quite pleased with is that the user interface is adaptable. The calculation definitions expose their own input and output parameters, and the interface uses that information to configure itself dynamically. That should make the tool easier to extend as more calculations are added.

Like the Gerber viewer, the calculation workbench is built with Vite, TypeScript, and Tailwind, and it runs completely in the browser. No uploaded files or calculation data are sent to the server.

These tools and demos are still evolving, but they are a useful part of the Protoworks website. They show the kind of practical engineering tools I like building, while also giving me something useful for my own electronics and embedded development work.

The calculation workbench is also hosted on my Protoworks website under the Demos & Tools section.

Looking to automate business workflows, self-host applications, or build bespoke web tools? Find out about my software development services at Protoworks (NI).