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Engineering portal — one place for the design projects

Status: plan, 2026-09-13. Angel's ask: the EmbeddedEra GitHub will hold many KiCad projects, and home should have an engineering subdomain gathering everything about design work, with projects added over time.

What it is

engineering.embeddedera.com, behind the same gate, listing every design project the shop has, and for each one the things you actually go looking for:

  • the schematic and board, viewable in a browser — KiCanvas renders KiCad files directly, no install, no export step, so a project page shows the real thing rather than a stale PDF
  • the BOM, and an InteractiveHtmlBom for the bench: click a line, the part highlights on the board. This is the one that earns its keep during assembly
  • the latest checks: ERC, DRC and library conformance, with the date they last ran
  • links out to the ERP parts, the build orders, and the SOPs that govern the work

Where the content comes from

Nothing is hand-maintained. Each project repo under github.com/EmbeddedEra is the source; CI produces the artefacts on every push (see task-board for how failures become tasks):

push → kicad-cli: ERC, DRC, gerbers, BOM → InteractiveHtmlBom → publish

The portal is then a thin index over those artefacts, built the same way the notebook is — MkDocs or a small static build, published to Pages, gated by Access, listed in departments.yml as a tile for Engineering and Administration.

Why it waits for the checks

The checks come first and the portal second, deliberately. A portal that shows a board is nice; a portal that shows a board and tells you its last DRC was clean on this commit is the thing worth having. Build kicad-cli in CI first, then wrap a page around what it produces.

Open questions

  • One page per project, or per revision? Probably per project with a revision history, because "which one did we build" is the question that actually gets asked.
  • How large do the artefacts get, and do they belong in the repo, in Pages, or in R2.
  • Whether the portal replaces or complements the ERP's own part and build pages. It should complement: the ERP owns numbers and stock, the portal owns drawings and checks.

Related: task-board, notebook-site, KiCad, ai-across-departments.

Log

  • 2026-09-13: written, after Angel asked for an engineering subdomain over the GitHub projects.