Hey everyone! Today we are going to show you how to view your PCB design in 3D online for free. We found a great tool over at instructables.com that could be very usefull for anyone who designs circuit boards and lets you avoid any unexpected result after ordering your boards.

The realistic 3D view provided by this valuable tool would boost your confidence before you submit your design files for manufaturing since it gives you the possibility to visualize layout, spacing, relative size, etc and we know that this is so hard to do with a PCB layout software (like Eagle, Altium, etc).:

“With the 3D Gerber Viewer, you’ll be able to upload your Gerber files and zoom, pan, and rotate your board to have a realistic view of your PCB and all of the layers that it contains.  You can use this viewer as you develop your board and also before you ship your final CAD files off to be manufactured.”

In order to view your PCB in 3D first you need to export Gerber CAD files from your layout software, the Steps to generate Gerber files in Eagle are listed in the article here. Then all you have to do is to upload these files to the viewer in this page and your board 3D view should be ready to explore 🙂

I used this great PCB service to visualize the Papilio One PCB using the Gerber files that I got from Eagle and here is a video of the viewer in action:

We’ve got the original article here if you want to read the whole thing complete with a full description of the process to start visualizing your own PCB designs in 3D.