KiNotes

Every PCB designer has been there:

Design notes end up scattered across text files, sticky notes, emails, and memory. When you need them months later—during a redesign or debugging session—they're either lost or useless without context.

KiNotes fixes this by keeping notes where they matter: inside your KiCad project.

Every hardware project starts with excitement—that rush when a new board idea clicks into place. But somewhere between the first schematic and the final layout, things get messy. You're routing traces at 2 AM, chasing DRC errors, fixing the same footprint issue for the third time. Sound familiar?

Here's what I noticed after years of PCB work: the projects that succeeded weren't always the most clever designs. They were the ones with clear notes. The ones where I could remember why I chose that capacitor value, or what test failed on Rev A.

KiNotes started as a simple text file I kept open next to KiCad. Nothing fancy—just a scratch pad for design decisions. But I kept losing it, forgetting to save, opening the wrong version. The notes lived outside the project, and that was the problem.

So I built this. A notes panel that lives inside KiCad, saves automatically with your project, and stays out of your way until you need it. No cloud accounts, no sync conflicts, no friction.

Over time, it grew. Task tracking for those TODO lists that always pile up. Time logging because clients ask "how long did that take?" BOM integration because you shouldn't need three tools open to design one board.

The philosophy hasn't changed though: a note written today saves hours tomorrow. A design decision documented now prevents the same argument six months from now. It's not about being organized—it's about not repeating your own mistakes.

KiNotes is open source because good tools should be shared. If it helps you ship better boards, that's the goal. If you want to make it better, the code is there.

Built for engineers who've learned that memory is unreliable, but good notes aren't.