The Community for
Creative Electronics
The CircuitMaker Community makes working together, sharing designs and iterating easier than ever. Join now.
Circuitmaker is a unique combination of the broad design community, a free PCB Design software and services, that allow everyone to work on the same premise and share the knowledge with ease. We know, to turn great ideas into real products, you need design tools that won’t limit your imagination or hold you back. The CircuitMaker PCB Design Editor has all the power you need to design high quality schematics and layout, with no artificial limits on layer counts or board area. Best of all, it's free to use.
Get CircuitMaker NowThe CircuitMaker community is where you will find great reference PCB designs.
You can promote and rate projects from the community to support your fellow PCB designers.
Eli Hughes
Wavenumber LLC.
Being part of the CircuitMaker community provides you access to a free PCB tool that has features of a professional design tool. The folks at CircuitMaker have a unique vision about creating a platform, not just a barebones tool for those who aspire to be “mad engineers.
Roberto Lo Giacco
Professional Engineer
Finally some fresh air in the EDA market: a modern interface with some really pro capabilities and no serious limitations. This is the tool any electronics maker was waiting for and it is community focused.
Nicholas Rabault
The Poppy Project
We love CircuitMaker because it offers the possibility of our community to contribute easily. We can promote our board model by sharing a simple link to a release. Users can produce our designs themselves or by forking it to adapt it to their needs.
Being a part of the Open Source Hardware Community we think you deserve better design tools, made specifically for you and the community you belong to. That’s why we’ve created CircuitMaker; a free PCB Design Software, built on Altium Designer technology. With a streamlined interface and powerful engine to boot, you’ll never have to worry about your software holding you back. See what you can do with CircuitMaker.
Typically, free EDA software comes with design restrictions that render it useless for any real project. With CircuitMaker, you get the full power of 16 signal layers plus 16 plane layers, and no restrictions to the PCB dimensions. Also, with no commercial clause restrictions, you are free to earn revenue with your design.
CirucitMaker is built on a community library with hundreds of thousands of components, all backed by the comprehensive, realtime Octopart database. Placing components in CircuitMaker designs is as easy as searching by manufacturer part number or by design parameters. You can also add your own custom parts and mechanical components.
Supported by Altium 365 platform you can create and work on projects with your team or invite other community members to work with you on the design. Harness the power of teams to get projects done faster. Projects can be forked and modified at any time so you can build new designs using the community wisdom and experience without having to start from scratch.
Altium Native 3D™ technology means that when you’re in the PCB editor, just hit the 3 key and you can immediately see the PCB layout in full interactive 3D. It will show any component clearance violations and you’ll also even know what the overlap distances are, so you can get your designs right — and to fit the box — the first time.
Once you’ve finished your design, release the project to the community. From there, you can download the gerbers and send them off to any PCB manufacturer. To make it easy, we’ve partnered with select manufacturers to provide a one-click manufacturing button that can directly send your board for quoting — either bare board prototype or full PCB fabrication and assembly—at the best possible price.
Routing capabilities are robust in Circuitmaker. The interactive routing modes include obstacle avoidance, hug, hug-n-push, and obstacle ignore. The push modes will push other traces and vias, as well as hop-over. You can even route differential pairs and interactively add accordions to nets that need that extra length for signal delays.
CircuitMaker uses the same easy-to-use schematic editor as Altium Designer. You can create complex multi-sheet designs, use hierarchical design blocks, and generate SmartPDF™ outputs from your project.
The Situs™ topological autorouter works in concert with your design rules to help you get the board done fast. With BGA and SMT fanout, parallel memory, hug, and via optimization, it’s easy to use Situs to get working results really fast. You can also interactively route multi-nets or single nets, or use manual routing with auto-complete.
When you’re ready to turn your virtual design into a real physical board, CircuitMaker will generate industry standard CAM outputs. You can choose Gerber and NC Drill, or ODB++, or both. IPC test point reports and all other necessary outputs for professional manufacturing can be generated as well, and all this through a succinct release process that ensures your board passes design rules checks for DFM and assembly.
