About MakerSuite 3D
Last updated: April 24, 2026
A privacy-first PCB, schematic, and 3D-model workbench. Built by one engineer who kept running into the same paper cuts — and decided to fix them.
What is MakerSuite 3D?
MakerSuite 3D is a free, browser-based workbench for electronics and mechanical makers. Drop in a KiCad board, an EasyEDA JSON, a Gerber zip, an Altium .PcbDoc, or a STEP model — the tool renders it in 3D right in your browser, with zero installs, zero uploads, and zero signups.
Every parser, every viewer, every converter runs in WebAssembly and JavaScript on your own machine. Nothing you open here is ever sent to a server. If you close the tab, the file is gone. That is the entire product philosophy in one line.
Why I built it
In early 2026 I wanted to review a friend's KiCad board on a laptop that had nothing installed. Every "free online viewer" I tried demanded a signup, uploaded the file to someone else's server, paywalled the Gerber rendering, or was abandoned shareware that had not been touched since 2017. The mechanical-CAD side was worse — viewing a supplier's STEP assembly meant installing a 2 GB eDrawings binary.
So I started building one for myself, on evenings and weekends. Every time I hit a paper cut (parsers that refused a specific KiCad version, BOM cross-matching that only worked with LCSC, converters that silently lost scale), I fixed it and shipped it the same week. MakerSuite 3D is the cumulative result. It is still a side project, which is why the code ships fast and the privacy story stays uncompromised.
What's inside
The site is organised around three surfaces — a PCB / schematic viewer, a 3D model viewer, and a format-conversion hub. Each surface is designed to be self-explanatory: drag a file, see the result, act on it.
- PCB parsers for KiCad, Gerber, EasyEDA, Altium, and Eagle — full track / pad / via geometry, net highlighting, and BOM extraction with LCSC / DigiKey / Mouser cross-matching.
- 3D model viewer with native readers for STEP, STL, OBJ, GLB, glTF, FBX, DAE, PLY, 3MF, 3DS, and USDZ — orbit, measure, screenshot, AR preview.
- Format converters between all mainstream PCB and 3D formats, running entirely in your browser via occt-import-js, three.js exporters, and WebAssembly mesh processors.
- Tooling utilities: impedance calculator, circuit analysis, PCB design review, polygon decimation, mesh repair, model diff, and more.
- Thirty-plus technical blog posts covering PCB fabrication, 3D printing workflows, format trade-offs, and case studies — all written from first-hand experience, not generated.
Operating principles
Who's behind this
Day job lives in Siemens Process Simulate and Autodesk Inventor — planning assembly lines, robot cells, and mechanical fixtures. Evenings go to hobby PCB work (ESP32 boards, custom keyboards, small lab tools) and to the web stack that keeps this tool alive. The overlap between those two worlds is where MakerSuite 3D came from.
Contact
I read every message. If MakerSuite 3D chokes on one of your files, if you hit a parser bug, or if you have an idea for the roadmap, please reach out. The fastest way is email:
For quick, non-urgent suggestions, the in-app Feedback button opens a Google Form that lands in the same inbox.
Supporting the project
MakerSuite 3D is free and will stay free for the core workflow. If the tool saved you from an eDrawings install or a "please enter your email" paywall and you want to buy me a coffee, there is a Ko-fi link at the bottom of every page. No pressure — a bug report or a tweet helps just as much.