Docs

A board, and how it was made

This is a real board, drawn in Rivet PCB by hand and rendered by the app's own 3D viewer. Sixty-five millimetres of FR-4, eight parts, one regulated rail, a ground pour on the back and a file set a fab could take. Everything below is how it got there, and none of it needs an agent.

A finished two-layer printed circuit board rendered in three dimensions: a barrel jack on the left, a through-hole diode, two electrolytic capacitors, a TO-92 regulator, a surface-mount resistor and LED, and a two-pin header on the right, with copper tracks joining them.
A 70 × 45 mm bench supply, built one step at a time in Getting started. The 3D view is the app's, not a render made elsewhere.

What it is made of

Two documents, one project. The board holds the copper: footprints, tracks, vias, pours and the milled outline. The schematic holds the intent: which pin is connected to which, and what each part is. Neither is generated from the other — you draw the schematic, and one menu row carries it across to the board as footprints and ratsnest lines.

The same board in the two-dimensional board editor: red front copper, footprint outlines, pad numbers and the ground pour showing through on the back layer.
The same board in the editor. Red is front copper, the hatched field is the ground pour on the back.
The schematic the board came from: a barrel jack, a Schottky diode, two polarised capacitors, a linear regulator, a resistor and an LED, joined by wires and net labels, inside a drawing sheet frame with a filled title block.
The schematic it came from — eight parts, wires where a wire is clearer, net labels where a name is.

What Rivet PCB is

A schematic editor and a board editor in one window, reading and writing real KiCad symbol and footprint libraries, shipping the KiCad library set, and exporting Gerber, Excellon drill, STEP and VRML. It runs as an ordinary desktop application on macOS, Windows and Linux. There is an agent in the sidebar, and it is genuinely optional: close the panel and what is left is a complete pair of editors with nothing leaving the machine.

Where to start

Getting started builds the board at the top of this page from an empty project, one screenshot per step, with no agent anywhere in it. If you would rather ask for a board than draw one, The agent is the faster way and comes after — in that order on purpose.

Sections

Getting started Install it, then build one real board by hand: schematic, wires, labels, footprints, routing, a via, a pour, DRC, 3D and Gerbers. → Schematic Symbols, wires, labels, hierarchical sheets, the live violation count, and the title block. → Board layout Footprints, walk-and-shove routing, differential pairs, zones and pours, the stackup, DRC. → Libraries 22,744 symbols and 15,124 footprints, how they are indexed, and how to search them by hand or through the agent. → Export & fabrication Gerber and Excellon drill, plots, BOM and netlist, STEP and VRML, and the batch job runner. → The agent What it can and cannot do unattended, how a turn is shown, and why one undo takes the whole turn back. → Keyboard shortcuts Every key binding that actually exists, grouped by where it works. →